Quotes By 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.

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.

Usually my ideas are small.

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.

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