I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.

Virgin suicide What was that she cried? No use in stayin' On this holocaust ride She gave me her cherry She's my virgin suicide

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

To start with, look at all the books.

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly