Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

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

Don't waste your time on life.

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.

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

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

I don't know what you're feeling, I won't even pretend

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

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.

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

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.

The time has to be right and the heart willing.

My goal in life is to become an adjective.

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.

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

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.