Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.

I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.

I get to show the reader the essence of the book without giving anything away.

The first paragraph of my book must get me my reader. The last paragraph of a chapter must compel my reader to turn the page. The last paragraph of my book must ensure that my reader looks out for my next book.

I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

As a reader, I have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for boredom, and I find that comes in handy with my writing. If I get bored writing something, I pity the people who will then try to read it.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.

If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.

I follow only one rule in my writing, and that is to be interesting. If the story is interesting to you, the writer, then it will probably be interesting to somebody else.

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?