Art & Creativity Quote by Curtis Sittenfeld

The fantasy of the novelist as a creature of sacred routines gets quietly punctured here. Sittenfeld isn’t selling incense-and-typewriter mystique; she’s describing attention as the real commodity, and it’s scarce. “I don’t really have special rituals” reads like a gentle refusal of the performative productivity culture that treats creativity as a hackable lifestyle brand. No fetish objects, no superstition, just the unglamorous mechanics of focus.

The key move is the threshold she sets: “a minimum of a few hours.” That’s not preciousness; it’s an admission that fiction requires a long on-ramp. You don’t simply open a document and start “being imaginative.” You have to re-enter a made-up world, reacquaint yourself with characters’ emotional physics, and rebuild the internal logic that makes invented scenes feel inevitable. The subtext is that short bursts can be worse than useless: they train you to skim across the surface of the work, never deep enough to hear what the story is actually asking for.

Her phrasing also deflates the romantic idea of inspiration. “Settle into a mode” sounds almost like shifting gears, or lowering into a groove. Concentration isn’t a lightning strike; it’s a state change. In the broader context of contemporary life - fragmented schedules, constant pings, the moral pressure to be available - the quote becomes a quiet defense of uninterrupted time as a prerequisite, not a luxury. It’s a writer insisting that depth has a minimum buy-in.