Jeffrey Eugenides

I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life.

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

I think the main thing I remembered throughout all of filming it was just that she just was extremely self-destructive. I think everybody can relate to that a little bit. She doesn't like herself.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.