Gaitskill Quotes & Sayings

Things are always less important once you're assured of having them. — 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 found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15. — 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

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

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

I shouldn't be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. for a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her. — 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

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. — 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

It was like everything that supported the relationship was coming from the outside. Judging by all the signs, we were a perfectly successful couple and John was an ideal husband for me - rich, blond, tall, sensitive, ad nauseam. But even worse, it seemed as if our most intimate conversations were based on what we were supposed to be saying, and what we were supposed to be. Nothing seemed to come directly from us. — 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

Well, chaos was not unfamiliar to him. In daily life, his emotions were chaos. He let himself become a vessel for them, letting feeling roar through him, pulling him around like a kite, boiling him like water in a kettle, dissolving him in a whirl of elements. — 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 had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful. — Mary Gaitskill

There are no pure people. — 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 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

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.' — Mary Gaitskill

Anne Frank's diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so. — Mary Gaitskill

You can teach people a lot about craft and various techniques, and you can certainly teach them to appreciate, but you cannot give them spirit or soul if it's not there. — Mary Gaitskill

He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt it on her lips, he put his mouth on her lips. If he found it on the palm of her hand, he opened her hand and licked it up. Her soul darted here and there, sensitive as any creature, tipping her center of balance back and forth as it oscillated. She liked this, and if she had any fear, she did not take it seriously. He liked it, too, so much that he could barely concentrate on the chase. — 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

But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality. — 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

She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, I hope you are a savage. — Mary Gaitskill

Human beings look so different from each other, voices are so different, everything about us is so individual, and that's so exciting and juicy and appealing, and we're attached to these things and they're so fascinating and beautiful - I don't just mean model-beautiful, but all the individual forms that people can take. — Mary Gaitskill

It's true that your environment influences how you write. — Mary Gaitskill

The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response. — Mary Gaitskill

Death is a big theme in the book, illness. What is that? It's a fact that human beings - no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are - are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that's a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around. — Mary Gaitskill

Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores. — 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

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

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

The best definition I've heard is that guilt is about what you've done, shame is about who you are. If something's out of my control, I don't feel shame about it, because what could I have done? If you're guilty, you can at least try to atone for it or make it better or not do it again. If it's who you are, you can't do much about it except change yourself, and that's pretty hard. — Mary Gaitskill

There's no love in you because there's no sex in you. Sex is light and fertility and life and communication! You only have this ... pornography and submission and blackness and death! You're like a faggot! — Mary Gaitskill

The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible. — Mary Gaitskill

The place Joanne is building inside [herself] has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors and old-lady healers and people trying to love their asses and people who think they're stupid for it. In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put on the wall. Not because it is good but because it is trying to understand something. In these rooms, there will be understanding. In these rooms, each madness and stupidity will be unfolded from its knot and smoothed with loving hands until the true thing inside lies revealed. — Mary Gaitskill

My ambition was to live like music. — Mary Gaitskill

My mother looked at my image as if she were looking at a wicked little girl come to scornfully show herself to her poor mother. There was love in her look, but with such jealousy mixed in that the feelings became quickly slurred. It was what my mother gave me, so I took it and I gave it back; I reveled in her jealousy as she reveled in my vanity. Reveling and rageful, we went between sleep and dreams right there in the dining room. Silent and still, we attacked each other like animals. — Mary Gaitskill

She was starved hurting limbs. — Mary Gaitskill

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

It's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an obsession. — Mary Gaitskill

In my opinion, most of us have not been taught how to be responsible for our thoughts and feelings. I see this strongly in the widespread tendency to read books and stories as if they exist to confirm how we are supposed to be, think, and feel. I'm not talking about wacky political correctness, I'm talking mainstream ... Ladies and gentlemen, please. Stop asking, "What am I supposed to feel?" Why would an adult look to me or any other writer to tell him or her what to feel? You're not supposed to feel anything. You feel what you feel. Where you go with it is your responsibility. If a writer chooses to aggressively let you know what he or she feels, where you go with it is still your responsibility. — 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 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

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

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

When he held her that way, she felt so happy that it disturbed her. After he left, it would take her hours to fall asleep, and then when she woke up she would feel another onrush of agitated happiness, which was a lot like panic. She wished she could grab the happiness and mash it into a ball and hoard it and gloat over it, but she couldn't. It just ran around all over the place, disrupting everything. — 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

People tend to set themselves up in patterns; something happens, it hurts them, then something similar happens, and - it's happened again! It seems much bigger then, and they get worried and go through life looking for that thing, and because they're so concerned and looking for it, when anything that happens resembles that thing, they're sure it's happening again. So sometimes people think things are repeating even when they're not. — Mary Gaitskill

Valiantly, he tried to bring his soul to life in the small thing through which it had to live, and it was crushed, again and again. — Mary Gaitskill

I remember a class I taught at Ohio State where I assigned a Mary Gaitskill story, which really wasn't that bad, and I had this one girl refuse to read it. But better that reaction than no reaction at all. — Donald Ray Pollock

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

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

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

Loading your brain with subliminal messages ... How loathsome to turn a sadistic murder into entertainment [in the newspaper]
and yet how hard not to read about it. What dark comedy to realize that you are scanning for descriptions of torture as you disapprove. Which of course only makes it more entertaining. "But naturally I was hoping they'd report something grisly," you say to your friends, who chuckle lighthearted acknowledgment of hypocrisy. — 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

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

She disapproved, but part of her seemed secretly to sympathize with the sickness. It was like she thought everybody had it, and the best you could do was to cover it up, and sometimes it would just come boiling out anyway. Then you had to point at it and condemn it, even though you knew you had it too. — Mary Gaitskill

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

I didn't like horses when I was a kid. — Mary Gaitskill

The most rigid pattern was not the one imposed by the school system or the adolescent social system. It was the pattern I made of the people around me, a mythology for their incomprehensible activity, a mythology that brought me a cramped delight, which I protected by putting all possible space between myself and other people. the boundaries of my inner world did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my most external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded. — 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

Dani said this woman, with whom she'd lived for two years, had never known her. "I feel like people accept the first thing I show them," she said, "and that's all I ever am to them. — Mary Gaitskill

I didn't want to keep forcing myself to grind out book after book. — Mary Gaitskill

When I was a kid, I did want to be a boy. I didn't like to play with dolls, and most of my friends were kind of sensitive, sissy boys. But as I got older, the mystique of being a girl began to interest me. It was confusing what sexuality was, and the responses of other people, but it didn't make me feel terrified or vulnerable. — Mary Gaitskill

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

Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs. — Mary Gaitskill

But now all the natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely that the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells. — Mary Gaitskill

He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his. — 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

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

She doesn't think that the mean people she knows are the most passionate; they just want to laugh at everything. But then she remembers that she laughed when a boy in class played a joke on an ugly girl and made her cry. — Mary Gaitskill

I don't mean you should despise people for being weak, if it's a kind of weakness they can't help. But when they're weak on purpose, it's another thing. When they don't even try. When they let people hurt them and don't fight back. It's gross. It's letting down the whole human race. — 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 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

Writing is ... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment. — 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

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

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

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

I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won't be fit for human society. — 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 think the closest thing I can come to defining what that vital thing is for me - is that there's a sort of soul-quality in writing, if it's any good. It has a spirit or an energy to it that is very integral to who the writer is on a deep level. It's almost a cellular thing. It takes place in the cells of the writing, and it is what makes it alive or not. — Mary Gaitskill

At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people - intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete. — Mary Gaitskill

He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers. — 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

I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons. — Mary Gaitskill

The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge. — Mary Gaitskill

I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.' — 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

Of course there's something there; unfortunately, there's always something 'there.' Something you will one day be sorry you saw. — 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

When John took those naked pictures, the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.
I drop the rag in the bucket and smoke some more, ashing into the sink,. A tiny piece of the movie from the naked time plays on my eyeball: A psychotic killer is blowing up amusement parks. At the head of the crowd clamoring to ride the roller coaster is a slim, lovely man with long blond hair and floppy clothes and big, beautiful eyes fixed on a tiny strip of light that only he can see. — Mary Gaitskill

I wanted to know people. I wanted to love. But I didn't realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn't realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn't know how to be with another person. I could only fix that person in my imagination and turn him this way and that, trying to feel him, until my mind was tired and raw. — Mary Gaitskill