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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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There Are People We

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.

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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.

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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.

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I Feel Like People Who Criticize Authors For Being Self-promotional Fail To Recognize That A Lot Of Times Their Ability To Continue Writing Hinges On Sales And Recognition. Some Of It Is For Fun, Some Of It Is For Ego, But A Lot Of It Is Just Writers Trying To Ensure Longevity To Their Career.

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.

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The Fact Is That In This Day And Age I Don't Think Any Novelist Can Assume That A Book Will Get Attention.

I'm Able To Separate Fiction And Reality. I Guess It Remains To Be Seen If Other People Are.

I Think I Would Have Liked To Have Been A Twin... Sometimes My Sisters And I Get Mistaken For Twins, And I Always Take It As A Compliment.

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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.

Ironically, Writing A Novel Is Not A Way To Sort Out Your Confusion.

I've Had People Say Very Dismissive Things About My Books, But I Also Feel Like I Probably Have More Readers Because I'm A Woman. I Mean, More Readers Are Women And More People Who Buy Books Are Women, So I Don't Feel Like It's A Total Disadvantage To Be A Female Writer.

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

I Just Think That People Are Complicated, Both Men And Women. It Happens That I Write More About Women.

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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

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Being Raised In An Unstable Household Makes You Understand That The World Doesn't Exist To Accommodate You, Which... Is Something A Lot Of People Struggle To Understand Well Into Their Adulthood. It Makes You Realize How Quickly A Situation Can Shift, How Danger Really Is Everywhere. But Crises When The Occur, Do Not Catch You Off Guard; You Have Never Believed You Lived Under A Shelter Of Some Essential Benevolence. And An Unstable Childhood Makes You Appreciate Calmness And Not Crave Excitement.

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In Life We're Most Hell-bent On Proving Things That We're Not Really Sure Are True.

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I Just Like To Inhabit A Character Really Deeply.

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I Guess I Consider Myself At Times To Have Intuition.

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We Have To Make Mistakes, Its How We Learn Compassion For Others

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There Are People We Treat Wrong And Later, We're Prepared To Treat Other People Right.

Later On, When I Tried To Imagine How I Might Have Ruined Things, That Would Occur To Me - That I'd So Rarely Resisted, That I Hadn't Made It Hard Enough For Him. Maybe It Was Like Gathering Your Strength And Hurling Your Body Against A Door You Believe To Be Locked, And Then The Door Opens Easily - It Wasn't Locked At All - And You're Standing Looking Into The Room, Trying To Remember What It Was You Thought You Wanted.

She Was The Reason I Was A Reader, And Being A Reader Was What Had Made Me Most Myself; It Had Given Me The Gifts Of Curiosity And Sympathy, An Awareness Of The World As An Odd And Vibrant Contradictory Place, And It Had Me Unafraid Of Its Oddness And Vibrancy And Contradictions.

I'm So Trying To Give Up Meat.

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I Like It When Characters Are Some Combination Of Appealing And Maybe Flawed Or Self-interested. I Think In Terms Of Scenes, And What I Want A Scene To Achieve, And I Think That The Psychological Realism Arises From That.

I Actually Liked The Disolation Of Winter; It Was The Season When It Was Okay To Be Unhappy. If I Were To Ever Kill Myself, I Thought It Would Be In The Summer.

I Had The Fleeting Thought Then That We Are Each Of Us Pathetic In One Way Or Another, And The Trick Is To Marry A Person Whose Patheticness You Can Tolerate.

Of Course, I Didn't Imagine Then That I Could Have Had A Real Relationship With Any Guy. I Thought That By Virtue Of Being Me I Was Disqualified.

I Do Think I Was Trying To Entertain The Reader More Than I Was Trying To Purge Myself.

But I Never Thought Of Who He Wasn't, I Never Had To Explain Or Defend Him To Myself, I Didn't Even Care What We Talked About.

Well, I Think In My First Two Novels, Both The Characters Are Pretty Neurotic, Which I Would Say That I Am.

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?

I Wanted My Life To Start - But In Those Rare Moments When It Seemed Like Something Might Actually Change, Panic Shot Through Me.

There Are So Many People Who Are So Much Better Qualified To Write About Politics Than I Am.

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.

There Are A Lot Of Things In The World That Are A Lot Weirder Than Psychic Abilities, That We Accept As True.

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

I Feel Like If You Read Something, And It Makes You So Curious About A Topic That You Then Go Read Something Else, That's Exciting.

I'm Not Afraid Of Writing About Sensitive Subjects, But I Want To Be Careful How I Do So And I Know Not All Readers Will Think I Have Been, Of Course.

We All Make Mistakes, Don't We? But If You Can't Forgive Yourself, You'll Always Be An Exile In Your Own Life.

Forgive Yourself

I Feel Like A Lot Of Life Is Distasteful And Embarrassing. And You Just Push Through It. You Fix What You Can, And You Let Time Pass.

Foolish Names And Foolish Faces Often Appear In Public Places.

I Was 16 Years Old, Attending Boarding School, And I Loved Pride And Prejudice. From The Opening Pages, I Loved It. And I Will Say In My Class, Not One But Two Boys Told Me That I Reminded Them Of Lizzy Bennet. I Didn't Realize It At The Time But This Was The Nicest Thing That Any Male Would Ever Say To Me. This Was As Good As It Got.

... It Struck Me As So Hard To Believe I Was Really Getting What I Wanted; It Was Always Easier To Feel The Lack Of Something Than The Thing Itself.

When You Are A High School Girl, There Is Nothing More Miraculous Than A High School Boy.

I Guess Because Twins Have This Mystique, And Triplets - I Think The Normal Sibling Connection Potentially Can Be Very Powerful, And There's This Idea That It's Even More Powerful. It Really Is, Not Just Someone Like Me, But Another Version Of Me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Big Occurrences In Life, The Serious Ones, Have For Me Always Been Nearly Impossible To Recognize Because They Never Feel Big Or Serious. In The Moment, You Have To Pee, Your Arm Itches, Or What People Are Saying Strikes You As Melodramatic Or Sentimental, And It's Hard Not To Smirk. You Have A Sense Of What This Type Of Situation Should Be Like - For One Thing, All-consuming - And This Isn't It. But Then You Look Back, And It Was That; It Did Happen.

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.

I Think There Is Still Pressure To Marry. I Think There Is Still Pressure To Have Children. If You're Middle Or Upper Class, Those Pressures Exist At A Later Age Now.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone Who's Really Interested In Anything Spends Time Alone.

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