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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.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Person
Might
Details
Like
Creativity
People
Amount
Huge
Create
Character
Persons

More quotes by 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.
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There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.
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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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We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in.
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Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
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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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Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.
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Well, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.
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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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He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.
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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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You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.
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But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant
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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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I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.
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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.
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We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
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Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
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Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
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Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
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