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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
Must
Haven
Unfinished
Writing
Usually
Publish
Going
Realize
Novels
Novel
Anywhere
Realizing
Six
Least
Finished
Write
Pages
Everything
Havens

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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.
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Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
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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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Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
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that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
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Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide
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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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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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During a warm winter rain ... the basins of her collarbones collected water.
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I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.
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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.
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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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Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.
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It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection with the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.
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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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