Quote

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

Jeffrey Eugenides

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Away
Something
Doubts
Anymore
Forward
Doubt
Moving
Tell

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Image
Where else would she feel more comfortable than in this subterranean realm where people wrote down what they couldn't say, where they gave voice to their most shameful longings and knowledge?
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960 and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.
Jeffrey Eugenides