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.
Jeffrey EugenidesI'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.
Jeffrey EugenidesThe mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.
Jeffrey EugenidesI was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Jeffrey EugenidesThe window was still open.โ Mr Lisbon said. โI donโt think weโd ever remembered to shut it. It was all clear to me. I knew I had to close it or else sheโd go on jumping out of it forever
Jeffrey EugenidesWe knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other.
Jeffrey Eugenides