Quote

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

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
Scratch
Scratches
Start
Matter
Writing
Long
Always

More quotes by 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
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn't just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she'd always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
One of the reasons that art is important to me is sometimes it actually feels more coherent than life. It orders the chaos.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.
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
All wisdom ends in paradox.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
I was unemployable when I got out of college.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
My goal in life is to become an adjective.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
no reason to mention my peculiarities, my wandering in the maze these many years, shut away from sight. and from love, too.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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
Image
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