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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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Realizing
Six
Least
Finished
Write
Pages
Everything
Havens
Must
Haven
Unfinished
Writing
Usually
Publish
Going
Realize
Novels
Novel
Anywhere

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

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The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
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Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking it's passage for some reason.
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But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.
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I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
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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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It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
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I wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sku was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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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.
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On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
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The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
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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.
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If love were endless, if it were on tap, it wouldn't hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn't write about it.
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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.
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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