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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

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Mary Gaitskill
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Lucky
Unless
Happen
Young
Able
Rejection
Take
Whenever
Going
Writers
Always
Advice

More quotes by Mary Gaitskill

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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
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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
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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
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When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.
Mary Gaitskill
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The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
Mary Gaitskill
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The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.
Mary Gaitskill
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I think women who are very creative and giving members of society can be respected and accepted.
Mary Gaitskill
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Dani said this woman, with whom she’d lived for two years, had never known her. “I feel like people accept the first thing I show them,” she said, “and that’s all I ever am to them.
Mary Gaitskill
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I know several women my age who are really poor...because they spent most of their energy taking care of children.
Mary Gaitskill
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I focus more on the spiritual or psychic gains.
Mary Gaitskill
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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
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I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'
Mary Gaitskill
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When you approach the second half of your life, you start to unconsciously consider what you're passing on. As a writer, that's obviously part of what you're doing. And as a teacher, that's another way of passing on information, history, or whatever you have.
Mary Gaitskill
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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
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I don't have an opinion about whether or not politics should appear more in fiction or not, generally. I think politics are a part of life, but a part of life that most people don't think about very much, most of the time. Or, people think about it superficially and they talk about it superficially because they don't know very much.
Mary Gaitskill
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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