Top 40 Mary Gaitskill Quotes

I remember back in the ’90s, I used to feel criticized by women for not having children. Like there must be something wrong with me.

It’s scary to me to watch the world around us get less and less physical while in the imaginary world of pop culture, aggressive impulses and fear reactions are floridly, furiously stoked and indulged.

I didn’t start thinking about what I wanted to do professionally until I was 17. I was a hippie, but I did write.

The first person to blow up my fashion consciousness was a 14-year-old girl named Sandrine. She was the most beautiful human I had ever seen.

Not being locked into one set of feelings, which you run the risk of mistaking for the truth, you have greater and more intense access to all feeling states, including those you would never choose to act out.

I think people try to make the most of their time on Earth and also to ‘fix’ their time on Earth.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

I had really wanted adventure. At the time that I ran away, lots of kids ran away from home. It was something of a social phenomenon.

It’s true that your environment influences how you write.

I didn’t want to keep forcing myself to grind out book after book.

I don’t think that the Internet creates feelings that aren’t there, nor does it provide an outlet. On the contrary, what I have thought about things like computer games – what has disturbed me about them – is that they appear to stimulate feelings of aggression without providing any physical release.

When I was writing ‘Bad Behavior,’ I was very, very quiet. I would just sit there and listen to people. And if I was out in public, I was usually quiet, and people tended to assume I was stupid because I was a young, pretty girl who’s quiet.

I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn’t seem able to do it.

I think that’s the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it’s very mild.

I think that with the proliferation of writing programs, people tend to forget that you also have to get used to working alone, and you have to be your own support.

I don’t know if I can say exactly what I seek in books, but one of them would be to deepen and expand my understanding of the world.

Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.

Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness.

You can’t tell an 18-year-old to keep it down and turn off Britney Spears or whatever it is that they listen to.

Everyone says ‘Anna Karenina’ is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.

Married, you’re basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you’re not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you’re passing.

I didn’t like horses when I was a kid.

What is faithfulness, anyway? Can you be unfaithful to your own feelings and faithful to someone else? Is it faithful to lie in bed night after night with someone you love but no longer desire while ardently dreaming of someone else?

I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing.

If anything is scary about my writing, it’s that it’s the product of a very particular vision and doesn’t reference common speech that heavily. By ‘common speech,’ I don’t mean language as much as an agreed-on way of seeing, or a shorthand.

A sad person who is so involved with his sadness that he mistakes it for reality will have a hard time seeing himself as anything but sad. For him, the sadness is not a feeling that he experiences – it is him.

At 16, I was in Toronto and very shy and not hanging around with anyone who was intellectual in the slightest, so I didn’t really have the means to discuss what I was seeing and feeling.

I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful.

People say that if you talk too much about sex, you take away the mystery. I say, if you’re somebody who likes to talk, talk all you want – it’s not listening. You will never take away the mystery.

Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially.

Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.

Sometimes I decide I don’t want to write because it isn’t the thing for me to be doing right then, and I go do something else.

The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity.

When looking out the window and watching the water becomes a drama, then literally everything is a drama.

For two people to satisfy everything each needs for their entire lives is a tall order. Some couples may be equipped to do this. Some are not.

Anne Frank’s diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so.

I think a lot of writing, or a lot of young writers, especially, hold themselves back unnecessarily because they’re so upset about the idea that they might be sentimental or so concerned about being criticized that way or even being that way that they just shy away from any strong expression or emotion.

My parents had met in high school and married right after my father came back from World War II. They honeymooned in Paris and returned to that city when my father, in college on the G.I. Bill, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.

Having watched television, I would kind of play the role or picture myself on a television show or something like that. That’s maybe always been true of a certain type of kid, even before television maybe, but I think it’s been amplified to an insane level.