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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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Curtis Sittenfeld
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: August 23
Author
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld
Elizabeth Sittenfeld
Created
Theory
Question
Comes
Authors
Doe
Male
Character
Males
Much
Female
Characters

More quotes by Curtis Sittenfeld

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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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Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.
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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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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In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
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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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.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, I need a little more psychological realism.
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
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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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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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If you’re a parent in 2013, you have to get your hands on this book. Wise, engrossing, and so real that I fear Senior has been spying inside my house, All Joy is a must-read for those of us whose lives have been enriched and derailed by having kids.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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She really does like him, she likes lying next to him, she wants to be around him when you get down to it, can you say that about many people?
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.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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Perhaps this is how you know you're doing the thing you're intended to: No matter how slow or how slight your progress, you never feel that it's a waste of time.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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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.
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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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