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The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.
Mary Gaitskill
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Mary Gaitskill
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Writing
Integrating
Dynamic
Empathy
Ego
Impulse
Response
Call
Art
More quotes by Mary Gaitskill
Point of view changes so much as time goes on. And it's important to acknowledge that the truth is multifaceted. And yet that conversation has a very different meaning now because of this whole alternative facts thing, calling everything you don't like fake news.
Mary Gaitskill
Human beings look so different from each other, voices are so different, everything about us is so individual, and that's so exciting and juicy and appealing, and we're attached to these things and they're so fascinating and beautiful - I don't just mean model-beautiful, but all the individual forms that people can take.
Mary Gaitskill
I focus more on the spiritual or psychic gains.
Mary Gaitskill
But now all the natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely that the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells.
Mary Gaitskill
Death is a big theme in the book, illness. What is that? It's a fact that human beings - no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are - are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that's a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around.
Mary Gaitskill
I think if a woman is very happy with herself and at ease with her choices, it goes a long way toward making other people feel at ease with her.
Mary Gaitskill
I became very aware of how important it is to connect with children - possibly for the children, if they're in the mood for that - but certainly for the adults.
Mary Gaitskill
My ambition was to live like music.
Mary Gaitskill
She disapproved, but part of her seemed secretly to sympathize with the sickness. It was like she thought everybody had it, and the best you could do was to cover it up, and sometimes it would just come boiling out anyway. Then you had to point at it and condemn it, even though you knew you had it too.
Mary Gaitskill
Adultery is like, here's the way it is, and here's exactly what you're supposed to do. It's like cheating at Monopoly. For me, it just doesn't apply to human relations. I mean, I use the word sometimes because it's fair and everybody knows what it means, but I find it a very irritating word.
Mary Gaitskill
Even happy situations can easily start to feel miserable. So, I think that people who consider themselves sophisticated or who are in fact sophisticated have come to distrust stories that are uplifting or simply stories in which the characters get what they want in the end. Because in life, what you want is never the end.
Mary Gaitskill
I can be very in my head, but I don't trust my head all that much. My head is crazy. My head will talk to itself all day and all night if I let it. And my heart is less nutty, but it's kind of like an overexcited child. I don't trust my heart all that much either. My body is like a good horse. I trust my body.
Mary Gaitskill
Sexuality is a place where people are very vulnerable and can be experiencing and embodying very raw forces that they don't really understand and there's a question of how much you should control and how much you should play with those and what those forces really are, how you really feel about them. That's perennial.
Mary Gaitskill
The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.
Mary Gaitskill
I think people hold back all kinds of things. And in a way, they just want to be nice. They want to be civil.
Mary Gaitskill
When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.
Mary Gaitskill
He had lunch with Cecilia that afternoon. They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like they´d met with utter disappointment and become attached to it.
Mary Gaitskill
If I'm meeting somebody for the first time, I don't look them up on Wikipedia, or I try not to, because I would not want somebody to be thinking they knew me based on that. It's like even private citizens have to deal with this persona phenomenon.
Mary Gaitskill
You can teach people a lot about craft and various techniques, and you can certainly teach them to appreciate, but you cannot give them spirit or soul if it's not there.
Mary Gaitskill
Whenever young writers ask me for advice, I always say you have to be able to take a lot of rejection because, unless you're very lucky, that's what's going to happen.
Mary Gaitskill
