Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes
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It was painful, but sometimes you must have these painful moments where you tear yourself away from something that isn't working.
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I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.
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I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
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I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.
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I was unemployable when I got out of college.
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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.
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I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.
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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.
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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.
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I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
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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.
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I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
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Usually my ideas are small.
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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.
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You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
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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.