Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
Jeffrey Eugenides

Life, Making, Characters

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

Life, Real, Confused

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

Life, Alone, Path

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

Character, Book, Person

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

Bad, Job, Through

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

Yourself, Working, Sometimes

It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants.
Jeffrey Eugenides

Book, Second, Wants

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, 'Middlesex.'
Jeffrey Eugenides

Important, Writing, Philosophy

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

Work, False, Resisting

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

Quality, Writers, Reasons

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

Life, Art, Important

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

Experience, Winners, Getting

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

Person, Put, Else

The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.
Jeffrey Eugenides

Book, Different, Fair

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

Money, Pretty, Keep

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

Mind, Confidence, Vote

Usually my ideas are small.
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

Depression, Someone, Start

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

Marriage, Gay, Idea

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

Character, Person, Put

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 they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
Jeffrey Eugenides

Able, Found, Rules

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Biography

Nationality: American

Born: April 13, 1960

Links

Find on Amazon: Jeffrey Eugenides

Cite this Page: Citation

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