Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

I am generally wary of the demand for 'likeability' in fiction, which I think is a bastardisation of the demand of identification - itself something of a suspect notion.

The first job of a storyteller is to make the reader feel the story, to get the reader to live in the skin of the character.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

You want to feel that your reader does identify with the characters so that there's a real entry into the story - that some quality speaks to the individual.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.

As a viewer, I care about people, I care about characters, I care about perspective.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.