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" 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

Mother

Her

Goodbye

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

Mary Gaitskill

Kid

Horses

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I wasn't ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, 'Why would I want to do that?' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "