Quote

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

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
Firsts
Nothing
First
Timer
Always
Amateur
Remain
Begin
Knowing
Forever

More quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
it's amazing what you can get used to.
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
No matter how long your've been at it, you always start from scratch.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other.
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
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Don't waste your time on life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Whenever we got a glimpse, their faces looked indecently revealed, as though we were used to seeing women in veils.
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
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Image
Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
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
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides