Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

• I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn’t notice the years were going by.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• 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 write about myself, I get very confused.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• 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 then put in a huge amount of myself.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I’m aware of cliches and I’m aware of experiments that have been done and I’m aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I mean, when I got to Brown, the place was riven, because you had older professors who were basically new critics and had been teaching a certain way for 30 years. And then you had this other gang who was down with the semiotic program. And as a student, you were, in a way, forced to choose which cohort you were going with.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• You can tell when something’s not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don’t go away.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• It was a recession when I graduated, but I was so unequipped to have a job anyway, I don’t think it would have mattered if the economy was booming. I think I was expecting bad jobs. But as it went on through my 20s, I began to wonder how things were going to turn out.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn’t have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• We’re all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn’t know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.

   

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• 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 and feel like an ending. I don’t like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I’m hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• But I care about the reader, and I’m trying to keep the reader’s attention for as long as I can.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• 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 lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage – and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York – it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like ‘Anna Karenina,’ you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That’s traditional narrative manner, and I haven’t done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• It was painful, but sometimes you must have these painful moments where you tear yourself away from something that isn’t working.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn’t want to have normal student accoutrements.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I have a lot of novels that I haven’t finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it’s not going anywhere. I don’t publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I was unemployable when I got out of college.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• 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 will pick and choose.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides (48)

Birth:	8th March, 1960
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Professor, Writer

About

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He is an American novelist, short story writer and professor. He has written several novels include: The Virgin Suicides (Won- Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 1991), Middlesex (Won- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003), and The Marriage Plot (National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). He has written Short story collections, including Fresh Complaint. He graduated from Brown University. He earned an MA degree in Creative Writing from Stanford University. He is Professor of Creative Writing in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts.

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Today's Anniversary - 19th November

Births

• 1941 - Tommy George Thompson
• 1942 - Gary Ackerman
• 1919 - Alan Young
• 1959 - Richard Virenque
• 1939 - Larry King

Deaths

• 1850 - Richard Mentor Johnson
• 1971 - Xu Zhimo
• 1692 - Thomas Shadwell
• 1915 - Solomon Schechter
• 1987 - Sir John Rupert Colville