Mary Gaitskill

“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.”

“Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'”

“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.”

“I don't think that the Internet creates feelings that aren't there, nor does it provide an outlet. On the contrary, what I have thought about things like computer games - what has disturbed me about them - is that they appear to stimulate feelings of aggression without providing any physical release.”

“Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness.”

“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.”

“It's true that your environment influences how you write.”

“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.”

“I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing.”

“I didn't start thinking about what I wanted to do professionally until I was 17. I was a hippie, but I did write.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The hard truth is that there are people who believe they're writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don't make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility.”

“Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.”

“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.”

“I didn't want to keep forcing myself to grind out book after book.”