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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Mary Gaitskill Quotes

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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

– Mary Gaitskill

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

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

My first and strongest memories about perfume come from childhood, from my mother, and they are a complex blend of her private and public selves.

– Mary Gaitskill

I feel I’m often misunderstood by critics. People project a lot or exaggerate the subjective fragility simply because it’s frightening to them.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

I used to start at about 10 at night and work until early morning. My preferred way to work is to start in the early afternoon and work until about 3, go do errands, have dinner, and then write for a few more hours in the evening.

– Mary Gaitskill

Something like riding a horse – which I’ve recently started doing – requires courage, especially for me, as I started out being actually scared of horses.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

Where I grew up, in the Detroit area, there was a really good station. Sometimes you would hear songs for the first time on the radio, and if a really special song came on, somebody would turn it up, and everybody would just stop talking.

– Mary Gaitskill

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

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

I’ve noticed women my age and a little younger, anywhere from 35 to 50, saying, ‘Who would want to bring kids into a world like this?’ Or, ‘I don’t want to spend my life that way. I want to do my artwork.’ And they’re very unapologetically stating this.

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs.

– Mary Gaitskill

I loved to read and would read anything that roused my interest, whether it was below my age level or above it, even if I could barely make sense of it.

– Mary Gaitskill

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

– Mary Gaitskill

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?

– Mary Gaitskill

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

– Mary Gaitskill

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.

– Mary Gaitskill

People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn’t because they’re trying to fool you or because they’re hypocrites. It’s because they badly want to be that thing, and so they’ll try to be it.

– Mary Gaitskill

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