Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.

The writing is really hard. You're alone. It really pulls it out of you. You pull it out of your head. But when you're a director, you're shopping - you're picking this actor, you're picking this scene. It's like the most intense kinetic high-speed shopping of all time. You sit in a chair and it will all come rushing at you like a wind tunnel.

She would have been a very remarkable woman, if she had not been an old maid.

I am happy because I am no longer an author.

Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

The word 'spinster' tells you everything you need to know about our attitude of women who choose not to marry.

I didn't have any concept of Trainspotting being published. It was a selfish act. I did it for myself.

I think, always, with a new book, I get nervous. I think mostly it is because work is really important to me, and a book doing well is important because it buys you another one. Not because of the money but if you keep doing interesting work, work that people like, they will want you to do more, and offers that are interesting come in.

Writing feels safe, you know, it's a hard job, but at least you're in your office or wherever you are and there's no one standing over your shoulder staring at what you're writing. And when you're directing, everybody's looking over your shoulder.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.

And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

I know of nobody that is coming, I am sure, unless Charlotte Lucas should happen to call in- and I am sure my dinners are good enough for her, since she is an unmarried woman of seven-and-twenty, and as such should expect little more than a crust of bread washed down with a cup of loneliness.

Every writer prefers good reviews over bad ones, and every writer wants to have lots of readers. But if it doesn't happen, that's fine too. Perhaps I won't throw a party then; I'll simply go home and keep writing.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside

When I get about five readers I can rub together in one genre, I leave that genre and go somewhere else. And this is due to a vow that I made myself when I started writing - that if I had any success at all, I would not be bound to one form of writing. That I would write what moves me. The only way I can see me surviving and doing more than one book is to present the readers with a Dan Simmons novel, with whatever tropes and protocols from whatever genre I want to borrow them. If that builds a Dan Simmons readership, well then, okay. Otherwise, forget about it. I'd rather drive a truck.

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longer he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.