Curtis Sittenfeld Quotes

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

If you don't like my book, write your own.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

I write what I'm interested in.

I can only say that I myself wrote always as I wished, without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible.

You can only make the film that's in you.

Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

You know how they say, "Find your voice"? That's your voice, in your pajamas. And it doesn't mean that you're going to publish it or print it or people are going to see you in your pajamas. It just means you are going to construct the foundation in your pajamas, in that voice.

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

I don't know how to write without thinking what people would want. You don't know whether they want you to be black or white, so you kind of get a gray, something in the middle.

I'm really open to just about anything but I think the real dream is to be able to write my own thing.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

It has no meaning, what do you use to write, the only thing that is important is: what do you write. A machine to write a book instead of a writer is not invented yet, and probably will never be.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

I prefer writing originals.