Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

When I first concluded to print the book, I made an honest effort to construct it in the third person.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

We find in the novella a seamless interweaving of at least two narrative voices, one of which is that of an observer so sympathetic that his language appears to be Aschenbach's own, the other of which is superficially celebratory (except at the moment of moralistic condemnation) but undercuts Aschenbach by means of an ironic detachment.

Every single song I've ever written is sung by a character created by somebody else. Some might have a jaundiced view of love, some don't. But none of these songs is me singing - not a single one.

Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single 'reliable' narrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here?

All of my novels are democracies.

People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist.

I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.

One of the fun things about unreliable narrators is they can be funny. You can admire things about them and laugh with them.

I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

I make a film - and once I've made it, everyone comes along and says 'Ah! This is a film that's political, or social', or whatever. But I'm not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn't thinking about exactly what it all meant.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses.