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" 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. "

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" 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

Animal

Life

Nature

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 like horses when I was a kid. "

Mary Gaitskill

Kid

Horses

" 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. "

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

" 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

Right

Sometimes

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

People

Exercise

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

" 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. "