504 Quotes by Jeffrey Eugenides

I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

It was a recession when I graduated, but I was so unequipped to have a job anyway, I don't think it would have mattered if the economy was booming. I think I was expecting bad jobs. But as it went on through my 20s, I began to wonder how things were going to turn out.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.

There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.

I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.

You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.