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No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Writing
Long
Always
Scratch
Scratches
Start
Matter

More quotes by 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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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
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When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.
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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A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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it's amazing what you can get used to.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
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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The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
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
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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
Jeffrey Eugenides
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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
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Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope
Jeffrey Eugenides
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Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
Jeffrey Eugenides