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" 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. "

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" 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

Talking

Know

Teach

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

World

Scary

" I didn't like horses when I was a kid. "

Mary Gaitskill

Kid

Horses

" 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. "

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

" Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs. "

" 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. "

" It's true that your environment influences how you write. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Courage

Riding

" 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. "