Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

I'm not sure if I should say this, and it might sound arrogant of me, but I think there is a tendency to view female characters as consumer products.

I was frustrated in general with the way women are always portrayed. And it's always through a man's eyes.

The funniest things just come from honesty. We have a tendency to see female characters as representative of something larger than what they are, when male characters are just characters.

Male playwrights, on the whole, are probably more interested in male characters. They need women characters to be the women in their lives or to be the domestic difficulty.

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

There are relatively few role models for young people. We are in a society that is ruled by men.

People think anything done from a woman's perspective is only going to appeal to women.

In a lot of TV shows out there, the women are the weak ones, and the men are the strong ones.

Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into 'women's books' except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out.

There's a remarkable amount of sexism on TV. When male characters are flawed, they're interesting, deep and complex. But when female characters are flawed, they're just a mess. It's good to put more flawed but interesting female characters out there because it promotes equality.

I was called a misogynist because I was reducing women to mothers. 'Reducing women to mothers' - now there is possibly the most anti-women statement I've heard.

'Little Women' has interesting gender connotations. There are generations of women who love the book. But there are a lot of men who think it's sentimental, gooey stuff.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

Women cannot complain about men anymore until they start getting better taste in them.

I realized early on that I always hated girls who used their femininity to get what they wanted.

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

I'm so bored of reading scripts with these wonderfully complex male roles, yet the woman character just sits on the bed waiting for him to come home.

Part of the problem is that many directors treat female characters too often as precious. Or they want to live in a fantasy world where they just do spinning hook kicks and knock out guys who are six foot four, and that doesn't work either.

Because I'm a woman writing about women who do bad things, that's somehow very 'other.' When men write that, it's called a novel. It's just a book.

Would they call me a diva if I were a guy?

Female-driven shows have to be every single thing and are constantly criticized in a way that male-driven shows are not.

So many women characters are extensions of male fantasy.

I was a fan of the idea of Red Sonja, but the gender politics of the character made her hard to read, for me, at times.

Women's roles in the movies remain, for the most part, girlfriends, mothers, wives.

So many fantastic male characters are brooding, angry, and not nice; that doesn't happen as much with women.