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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 -
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
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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 -
Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.
Mary Gaitskill -
Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.
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.
Mary Gaitskill -
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 -
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
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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 -
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.
Mary Gaitskill -
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 -
I think people try to make the most of their time on Earth and also to 'fix' their time on Earth.
Mary Gaitskill -
Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially.
Mary Gaitskill -
Not being locked into one set of feelings, which you run the risk of mistaking for the truth, you have greater and more intense access to all feeling states, including those you would never choose to act out.
Mary Gaitskill
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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 -
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.
Mary Gaitskill -
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.
Mary Gaitskill -
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 -
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 -
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
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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.
Mary Gaitskill -
Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'
Mary Gaitskill -
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 -
I didn't want to keep forcing myself to grind out book after book.
Mary Gaitskill