Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.”

“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.”

“I was unemployable when I got out of college.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”