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We have to make mistakes, its how we learn compassion for others

Curtis Sittenfeld

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Curtis Sittenfeld
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: August 23
Author
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld
Elizabeth Sittenfeld
Make
Mistakes
Compassion
Mistake
Understanding
Learn
Others

More quotes by Curtis Sittenfeld

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I don't know what it is about human beings but most of us really like reading about or observing sexual tension and romance. It's just so much fun. I don't know if there is some Darwinian thing in us that really responds to that, but I think the most memorable scenes to me in books and movies are the ones where a couple is about to kiss.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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After I’d told her – the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair – she said, ‘Did he kiss you?’ ‘John and Martin totally would have seen that,’ I said, and as I felt myself implying the circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people – for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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Before and after... I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can't make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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Obviously the bar is much higher now for a behavior to be scandalous. Social media has really changed the way people live. It's not a new impulse it's just being enacted in a new way.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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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.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I guess I consider myself at times to have intuition.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination
Curtis Sittenfeld
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Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors
Curtis Sittenfeld
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If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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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.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating
Curtis Sittenfeld
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Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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The best part of being a writer for me is immersing myself in a fictional world, which is the opposite of being on social media. At the same time, if no one ever read my work, if I was writing solely for myself, I bet it would be lonely and a lot less fun.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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If you knew where your happiness came from, it gave you patience. You realized that a lot of the time, you were just waiting out a situation, and that took the pressure off you no longer looked to every interaction to actually do something for you.
Curtis Sittenfeld