Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

My ambition was to live like music.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

I think politics are a part of life, so I have no resistance to it, but it's not something I set out to do.

I think, life is miserable.

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

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.

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.

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