Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

I tend to write society as I see and understand it.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

Art imitates life. Life imitates high school.

Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.

It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.

When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement.

Write about society as news and treat it like sociology.

As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.

Stanley Hudson was the embodiment of many workers in America, both male and female. Creating the nuances of the character was fun and challenging in that much of his very being was grounded in his ability to editorialize any given situation, much of the time without uttering a single word.

I always try to relate a song to something what is going on, the working man, the times, how life goes.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

It's nice to go back and look at the original version of Cyborg in the 1980s, when he was created, and seeing how politically and socially charged they were: it was no holds barred. If DC ever made a return to that social awareness and that sort of context, I'd be super-thrilled to see that.

Multiple characters' opinions on societal roles, as well as their perceptions of themselves and others, help me lose myself in whatever strange and wonderful setting I'm reading about.

In an ideal world, we would be able to just swap characters' genders around because I don't ever wake up in the morning and think to myself, 'Oh I am such a woman today,' because that is just so ridiculous.

It is very difficult to make something like slice-of-life interesting. I don't think many people have done the slice-of-life dramas as good as TVF has done it.

I never set out to be the man who writes a lot of female characters.

I really want to do what 'Veep' did. 'Veep,' in a very comical way, gave us a look inside the political machine, but I want to do it for the average American family.

Stay Out' is about all the stereotypes of people you meet out and about.

One of my pleasures is observing people's behavior and pointing out the inconsistencies that we all sort of have at the center of our lives.

Very early on in the process of trying to sell 'The Summer Prince,' I was told, 'Slavery seems to be very important to this society - is that on purpose?' Well, duh.

The two pillars of feminism are narcissism and entitlement.

People often link grime with other things, like street culture, and clashing, and MC battles and whatnot. But no one's ever talked in misogyny in grime. That's often linked to hip-hop, I know people talk about that is a problem in hip-hop. But not grime.