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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: 70
Born: 1954
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Able
Rejection
Take
Whenever
Going
Writers
Always
Advice
Lucky
Unless
Happen
Young
More quotes by Mary Gaitskill
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
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
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
My ambition was to live like music.
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
It's bizarre: I've tried to understand why people are into Trump. I really don't think I can. I don't think it's as simple as just racism. I do think there's a fear that white people have, even if they don't have a vicious desire to do harm to black people, they fear losing their top spot.
Mary Gaitskill
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
I know several women my age who are really poor...because they spent most of their energy taking care of children.
Mary Gaitskill
When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.
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
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
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
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
The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.
Mary Gaitskill
The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
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
The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.
Mary Gaitskill
I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'
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 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
