Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Fashion
Beautiful
She
Related Quotes:
" 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
Perfume
Childhood
Mother
" 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
Feel
Fear
Need
" 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
Me
Sometimes
" 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
Me
Exercise
" I didn't like horses when I was a kid. "
Mary Gaitskill
Like
Kid
Horses
" 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. "
Mary Gaitskill
Think
Television
Picture
" 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
Time
Summer
Restaurant
" 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
Writing
Language
Way
" 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
Dress
Girl
Style
" Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness. "
Mary Gaitskill
Would
Three
Nightmare
" 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
Me
" When looking out the window and watching the water becomes a drama, then literally everything is a drama. "
Mary Gaitskill
Watching
Drama
Looking
" It's true that your environment influences how you write. "
Mary Gaitskill
Environment
How
Your
" 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
Thinking
Write
Start
" Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.' "
Mary Gaitskill
Want
Understood
Said
" I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it. "
Mary Gaitskill
Able
Communicate
Connect
" 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
Off
Down
Turn
" Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments. "
Mary Gaitskill
Moments
Most
Stories
" I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful. "
Mary Gaitskill
World
Strong
Conviction
" 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
Tall
Everything
People
" 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
Morning
Work
Way
" 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
Me
" 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 Can
World
Understanding
" 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. "
Mary Gaitskill
Sometimes
People
Movies
" 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. "
Mary Gaitskill
Parents
School
War
" 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
Trying
You
Present
" 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
Alone
People
Support
" I didn't want to keep forcing myself to grind out book after book. "
Mary Gaitskill
Want
Myself
Keep
" 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
Think
Upset
Writing
" 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
Identity
Gone
Imagination