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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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Curtis Sittenfeld
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: August 23
Author
Novelist
Teacher
Writer
Cincinnati
Ohio
Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld
Elizabeth Sittenfeld
Lives
Really
Deeply
People
Experiences
Gift
Novel
Inside
Personal
Point

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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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.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.
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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Anyone who's really interested in anything spends time alone.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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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.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I feel like as I've gotten older I've unfortunately come to the decision that a lot of people who seem normal and boring maybe are normal and boring.
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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I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites? She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, and I thought, You're sixteen. How can you already be a Republican?
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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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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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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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
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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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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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 just write the books that I think I would want to read.
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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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.
Curtis Sittenfeld