One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life is this: Do not preemptively take no for an answer. Do not decide your request has been rejected before it officially has. As with so many other lessons that involve assertion, this one applies far more to women than men.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

There are two kinds of marriages: the ones where you’re privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you’re not.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Mark Twain say something about courage being the mastery of fear rather than the absence of fear?

— Curtis Sittenfeld

A lesson I learned from Bill, a lesson that perhaps should be obvious, though there’s evidence that most other people don’t know it, either, is that direct and sincere compliments are shockingly effective – that they feel wonderful. What in theory should sound saccharine or manipulative rarely does in practice, so long as you believe the other person really means it. And we crave praise not, I think, because most of us are egomaniacal. It’s because we’re human.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

A sense of humor is always a bonus. As with dinner companions, so it is with short stories.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

A dystopian story must not merely be dystopian; it must also be a story. Premise can only get you so far.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Not only will I be there,” Liz said, “but I’ll be impersonating a pleasant woman with great manners.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

If I’ll never know how much this was my path because of fate and how much because I willed it, the question is less important than that I made it across. Now other women know they, too, can make it, and not because I or anyone else tells them. They know because they’ve seen it happen.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Could it be that Noah was one of those rare guys who didn’t essentially dislike or mock women, and who also didn’t ignore our existence, and who also didn’t see us primarily as objects of lust? That he was weirdly, disarmingly fine with us?

— Curtis Sittenfeld

All of which was to say that the sketches I’d written over the years about the absurdity and arbitrariness of beauty standards for women had arisen not from my clear-eyed renunciation of them but from my resentment at their hold on me.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Because my mother hadn’t been an ostentatious or performative person, it had taken me a long time, until college really, to realize how smart and funny she was, and how generously compassionate.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

It was a belated realization to have, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was how grown-up conversations worked – not that your communication didn’t falter, but that you both made good-faith attempts to rectify things after it had.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Aren’t we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Sometimes when I speak, I feel like I’m writing dialogue for the character of myself. I’m impersonating a normal human when really I’m a confused freak.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

Perhaps, as was often the case with human interactions, it meant nothing.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

You know the advice about how you should always play tennis with people better than you? When I’m talking to you, I’m a funnier and smarter version of myself because you’re funny and smart.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

If you’re our age and single, dating kind of has to be an act of reckless optimism, right? The triumph of hope over experience?

— Curtis Sittenfeld

His expression became both very tender and very amused, as if there were an excellent inside joke between us, and he tilted his head to the right and looked at me with a focused kind of sweetness and warmth.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

I knew how when you really liked a boy, all the little daily incidents shrank and slipped away. You carried around you anticipation of seeing him again and retrieved it when you felt bored or anxious, like a memory of something good.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

If you were a writer, you could be impressive in a cerebral sort of way, but if you were a musician, you got to be viscerally magical.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

I’m not going to say the rule doesn’t exist, but it’s like Santa Claus. It’s only real if you believe in it.

— Curtis Sittenfeld
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