Curtis Sittenfeld quotes - page 2

Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am. (Curtis Sittenfeld)
There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
Ordinarily, of course, I thought it best to remain inconspicuous, but the gesture had a certain irresistable theatricaility, and an inevitablility. Sometimes you can feel the pull of what other people want from you, and you sacrifice yourself, you risk seeming odd or sunsavory, to keep them entertained. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
Of course, I didn't imagine then that I could have had a real relationship with any guy. I thought that by virtue of being me I was disqualified. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
... it struck me as so hard to believe I was really getting what I wanted; it was always easier to feel the lack of something than the thing itself. (Curtis Sittenfeld)
High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
I just write the books that I think I would want to read. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
I'm SO trying to give up meat. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument? View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself. (Curtis Sittenfeld)
Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box was sealed, the door was shut, you were no longer immersed in the confusing middle. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
She has always been a bystander in family destruction, never realizing she herself possessed the capacity to inflict it. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld
I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate. View quote
Curtis Sittenfeld