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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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Jeffrey Eugenides
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: March 8
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
Detroit
Michigan
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides
Write
Revelations
Life
Confused
Stuff
Lots
Stories
Writer
Seems
Seem
Real
Though
Writing
Actually
Really
Use
Autobiographical
Make

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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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The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
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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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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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The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
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and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world
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We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.
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I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.
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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.
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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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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.
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But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.
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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 wanted to be an actor. My parents were not too keen on that.
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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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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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No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
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Don't waste your time on 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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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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