Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

• Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Topics in Life

• No matter how long you’ve been at it, you always start from scratch.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Scratch, Matter

• I think, especially when you’re in college, each book that you’re reading tends to tell you who you are.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• 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.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• 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 one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, ‘Middles*x.’

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing – rare but profound – remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• Some Pulitzer winners – novelists – have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn’t been my experience.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it’s a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• The Pulitzer isn’t a physical object. You can’t hold it in your hand. You get some money ($7,500 in my day), and you get a little Tiffany’s paperweight with your name on it and the image of Joseph Pulitzer suspended in the crystal. When people see my ‘Pulitzer’ (I keep it in my sock drawer), they are pretty amazed at its meagerness.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don’t start extremely early.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• A few years ago in Chicago, I rented an office, and I went there every day. For the most part I do work at home in an ugly room.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I always work in a room where there’s no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It’s glass on three sides, and you’d think that’s the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I’m too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

• Usually my ideas are small.

  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.

Related Authors

• Dante Alighieri
• Margaret Dilloway
• Elmore Leonard
• Lady Caroline Lamb
• Larry Dixon
• Phyllis Gotlieb
• Emma Donoghue
• Dennis Lehane
• Elizabeth J. Kolodziej
• Harry Summerfield Hoff

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 19th November

Births

• 1957 - Ofra Haza
• 1986 - Dayron Robles
• 1961 - Meg Ryan
• 1939 - Tom Harkin
• 1942 - Sharon Olds

Deaths

• 1987 - Sir John Rupert Colville
• 1915 - Solomon Schechter
• 2004 - Terry Melcher
• 1692 - Thomas Shadwell
• 1971 - Xu Zhimo