259 Quotes by Curtis Sittenfeld

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

There are a lot of things in the world that are a lot weirder than psychic abilities, that we accept as true.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable.

If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.

And an unstable childhood makes you appreciate calmness and not crave excitement. To spend a Saturday afternoon mopping your kitchen floor while listening to opera on the radio, and to go that night to an Indian restaurant with a friend and be home by nine o'clock - these are enough. They are gifts.

To remain alone did not seem to me a terrible fate, no worse than being falsely joined to another person.

I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.