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.

Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens.

I broke with my religion in college.