Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

About Jeffrey Eugenides:

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American novelist and short story writer. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides has been filmed, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

Jeffrey Eugenides

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

Jeffrey Eugenides

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so involved with operating the dummy that he, the ven...

Jeffrey Eugenides

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...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Fin da piccole sapevano quanto poco valore il mondo attribuisse ai libri, e non perdevano tempo a leggerli. Mentre io, anche adesso, continuo a credere che quei puntini neri su fondo bianco abbiano il più alto dei significati, che se insisto a scriv...

Jeffrey Eugenides

They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes, she shuffled as though baref...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.

Jeffrey Eugenides

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

Jeffrey Eugenides

But this is all chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-conc...

Jeffrey Eugenides

The Pulitzer isn't a physical object. You can't hold it in your hand. You get some money ($7,500 in my day), and you get a little Tiffany's paperweight with your name on it and the image of Joseph Pulitzer suspended in the crystal. When people see my...

Jeffrey Eugenides

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 marriage...

Jeffrey Eugenides

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to re...

Jeffrey Eugenides

I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

Jeffrey Eugenides

Author Bio

  • NameJeffrey Eugenides
  • DescriptionNovelist, short story writer, teacher
  • BornMarch 8, 1960
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship