Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose, high-lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense, but I thought that was my problem.

For the establishment, philosophy is both an elitist and an idealist discipline: In high school, it is a compulsory subject; at university, they teach the idealist line. They are conducting a conversation with themselves.

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read 'Moby-Dick' in a week.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

[plaintiffs] cannot, by simply filing suit and crying ‘character assassination,” silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how divergent those views may be to plaintiffs’ interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation […] More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models – not larger awards of damages – mark the path towards superior understanding of the world around us.

Universities used to be places where the major political and social issues of the day could be researched and debated. The results of this careful thought and analysis were used to make political debates in the wider world more realistic and better informed. All that has now been turned on its head. The campus offers not a reasoned corrective to partisan passions, but fierce, one-sided advocacy of dangerous and destructive ideas.

I've done projects where I've read 25 books and did all kinds of journal and character work for hours.

I was an English major at Brown. I never enjoyed history classes.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

At Harvard, I majored in English Literature.

I disagree with everything John Updike has ever said.

I have taught Philosophy, Religious Studies, English Literature, Cultural Studies, Writing and Publishing Studies, Critical Thinking.

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word - let alone your learning to write English - is, in short, impossible.

We take literature too seriously.

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

I started school because I felt like, as a songwriter, I was operating solely on instinct, and I was having a hard time deciding exactly what words I wanted to use. I felt like I wanted to be a writer, and being a curious person, school felt like a way to solve the problems I was having with my own work.