List of Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

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.

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.

I'm Constantly Having Doubts And Moments Of Depression And Then Excitement And Then Back Into The Slough Of Despond.

Detroit's A Great Music Town. If Your Interaction With It Was Mainly Musical, I'm Sure You Have A Good Opinion Of The Place.

I Remember Liking To Write Stories Pretty Early On. In Fourth Or Fifth Grade, They Would Give Us The Beginning Of A Story, And We Were Supposed To Finish It. I Remember Liking That. But I Didn't Think About Deciding To Become A Writer Until High School At About The Age Of 16.

I Wanted To Be An Actor. My Parents Were Not Too Keen On That.

There's A Kind Of Acting That Goes On In My Head When I'm Writing A Character Where I Put Myself In Their Place.

When I'm Creating A Character, It's A Little Bit Like What My Theater Teachers Used To Tell Me About Stanislavsky, Like If You're Using Sense Memory To Do A Scene - If You Have To Cry In A Scene, You Try To Remember Something In Your Life That Made You Cry And You Use That In Order To Get The Tears.

The Ideas For My Books Come About In Two Ways. There Can Be An Intellectual Idea That Seems To Be The Reason For Writing The Book. [...] The Other Motive Is Unconscious. There Is Something Deeply Psychological And Emotional That Draws Me To The Material In The First Place.

Being A Writer Is A Solitary Life. So The Little Part Of Me That's An Actor Still Enjoys The Theatrical Part Of Reading And Doing The Voices And Telling The Story.

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.

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 Read Some Of The Things I Might Not Read On My Own.