“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.”
― 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
“Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs.”
― 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
“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
“Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.”
― 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
“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.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“The hard truth is that there are people who believe they’re writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don’t make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“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
“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
“Anne Frank’s diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn’t seem able to do it.”
― 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
“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
“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.”
― 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
“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.”
― 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
“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.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons.”
― 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
“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
“When looking out the window and watching the water becomes a drama, then literally everything is a drama.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“There is a sense in which we have – like, I go in to teach a class; I may be somewhat different than I would be talking to you, although it’s related because it’s public. I’m very different with my roommate or my lover or my cats. But I don’t know if that means you’re acting, really, if you’re being truthful.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“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.”
― 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
“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
“Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“I didn’t want to keep forcing myself to grind out book after book.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“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.”
― 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
“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
“Somebody once said to me, ‘If you want to be understood, don’t write fiction.’”
― 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
“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
“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.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful.”
― 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
“It’s true that your environment influences how you write.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“I didn’t like horses when I was a kid.”
― 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
“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
“Between my hatred of mall shopping and my mother’s firm ideas about how a girl should dress, my style choices were pretty unenthusiastic: plaid skirts or whatever empire-waisted thingamabob was on sale at Sears.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn’t exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn’t exist yet, either.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“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.”
― 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
“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
“One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so above her knees and flat heels without stockings.”
― 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 found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“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.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“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.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“I wasn’t ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, ‘Why would I want to do that?’”
― Mary Gaitskill
“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.”
― Mary Gaitskill
“On the rare occasions when my mother perfumed herself, she was going out, and so I rarely smelled those special scents up close on her body, except during kisses goodbye.”
― Mary Gaitskill
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