Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

To me, there is nothing higher than fiction. Nothing. It is fundamentally who I am. I am a teller of stories. For me, that's the only way I can make sense of the world, with all the dance that it involves.

A lot of things that I write about have happened to people around me, if not necessarily to me or in the organizations I've worked in. Having said that, it's fiction and has a lot to do with my imagination and creativity.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

While novels are fiction, mine are usually very close to my heart. Like my other books, 'The Lemon Orchard' is inspired by something I care about. I care so deeply. The stories are my dreams, and I want to do a lot of research. Roberto is based on a real live friend of mine named Armando who worked in my garden.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do.

I was always inventing characters and making up stories.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I like to think of myself as a storyteller.

I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper. But a lot of it is imagination. It's not based on real people.

I make things up for a living. It would be pretty boring to just fictionalize real people.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?'

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.