Quotes from Jeffrey Eugenides

I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

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.

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.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

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

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.

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

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.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

They're just memories now. Time to write them off.

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.

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

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

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.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative.

If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.