Curtis Sittenfeld

“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.”

“There's a belief that to take care of someone else, or to let someone else take care of you - that both are inherently unfeminist. i don't agree. There's no shame in devoting yourself to another person, as long as he devotes himself to you in return”

“I just write the books that I think I would want to read.”

“I enjoy reading tips about how to be more organized, and I rarely implement them.”

“I grew up in Cincinnati, the birthplace of the creamiest and most delicious ice cream with the hugest chocolate chips. Graeter's used to be available only regionally, but an extravagant thing you could do was overnight-ship six pints to another state, in dry ice.”

“I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.”

“..and I thought how liking a boy was just the same as believing you wanted to know a secret - everything was better when you were denied and could feel tormented by curiousity or loneliness. But the moment of something happening was treacherous. It was just so tiring to have to worry about whether your face was peeling, or to have to laugh at stories that weren’t funny.”

“Something that's interesting is how my perspective on different events can change over time even though the events themselves haven't changed. As I get older, I interpret something differently, or I can even interpret a person differently.”

“In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.”

“Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.”

“No book I publish will be perfect, but I need to feel I've taken it as far as I can.”

“I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women.”

“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.”

“Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they're a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.”

“I don't think everyone is equally haunted by high school, but I also don't think it's unusual to be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In general, when any of us get outraged by relatively minor pop-cultural phenomena, I suspect it's a way of relaxing and not focussing on more daunting and intractable problems, whether personal or social.”

“Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.”