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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.'

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Serious
Affinity
Made
Philosophy
Influenced
Wells
Thinker
Foucault
Well
Literary
Derrida
Feel
Contribution
Michel
Philosopher
Roland
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Jacques
Important
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Writing

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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
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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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All wisdom ends in paradox.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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
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We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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