Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

213 quotes in 2979 categories

• I want an ending that's satisfying. I'm more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent…
• If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
• When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what…
• I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old…
• I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years.…
• That's the way I will write characters, put a fair amount of myself in them, and then everyone else who was like that person, I…
• Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a…
• I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
• I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
• I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
• I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.
• Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
• The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
• Usually my ideas are small.
• I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about…
• What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and…
• I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
• I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually…
• I have a very beautiful room in my house... It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in…
• Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been…

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