259 Quotes by Curtis Sittenfeld

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.

Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.

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.

Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.

To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?

I don't think that I would ever, while writing, think to myself, "I need a little more psychological realism."

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.

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.

What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?