Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
Jeffrey EugenidesThatโs how people live, by telling stories. Whatโs the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? โTell me a story.โ Thatโs how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.
Jeffrey EugenidesWell, marriage doesn't function in the way it used to in terms of deciding our fate, but it's in our heads, and it determines a lot of our actions. Like, right now, if you think about gay marriage - and they just started having the first gay marriages in New York - it shows what a potent idea marriage remains for people.
Jeffrey EugenidesWe felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldnโt fathom them at all. 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.
Jeffrey Eugenides