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I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

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
Life
Seemed
Like
Start
Actually
Moments
Change
Panic
Wanted
Rare
Might
Shot
Something
Shots

More quotes by Curtis Sittenfeld

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Of course a magazine is usually more interesting than a conversation, because so much more time and preparation has gone into it.
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The better you learn to take care of yourself, the less you settle for being around people who can't or won't treat you as well as you're accustomed.
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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.
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I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.
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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
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To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
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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.
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There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.
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We have to make mistakes, its how we learn compassion for others
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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.
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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.
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I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.
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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
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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.
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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.
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It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man
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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.
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I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.
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I feel that Pride and Prejudice is an incredibly well constructed novel on every level. The dialogue is great. The character development is great. The plotting is great. The pacing is great. The language is great.
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And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.
Curtis Sittenfeld