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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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
College
Reading
Tell
Book
Think
Thinking
Tends
Especially

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Capitalism has resulted in material well-being but spiritual bankruptcy.
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Lux spent the ride dialing the radio for her favorite song. It makes me crazy, she said. You know they're playing it somewhere, but you have to find it.
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She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
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and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world
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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.
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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.
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We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it--that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.” -Mrs. Karafilis
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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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She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
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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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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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Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.
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Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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
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They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
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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People don't save other people. People save themselves.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
Jeffrey Eugenides