American - Novelist | April 13, 1960 -
I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.
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I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.
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I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.
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Usually my ideas are small.
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I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.
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I always work in a room where there's no Internet to keep from being distracted so easily.
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A few years ago in Chicago, I rented an office, and I went there every day. For the most part I do work at home in an ugly room.
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I spend most of every day writing. I like to write every day if I can. I don't start extremely early.
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Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
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The Pulitzer isn't a physical object. You can't hold it in your hand. You get some money ($7,500 in my day), and you get a little Tiffany's paperweight with your name on it and the image of Joseph Pulitzer suspended in the crystal. When people see my 'Pulitzer' (I keep it in my sock drawer), they are pretty amazed at its meagerness.
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The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
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