Mary Gaitskill Quotes

Lot of people know very early what they want, but I didn't know I wanted acting.

I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. It's funny - people ask me that, and I don't know what to tell them.

People don't really know themselves until they're 30. Like most people nowadays, I went to university, got a degree and wandered for a bit. I trained to be a chartered accountant, which I didn't much enjoy, and it was only slowly that the idea of becoming a creative writer gelled.

If you knew what you wanted to be when you were 6 years old - great! If you have no idea what you want to be, that's OK!

I think I was on this very straightforward escalator - grammar school, high school, college, get a job on Wall Street, kind of everything leads to the next thing. But at what point do you get to step back and say, 'I'd like to take a broader view of my time on this planet?'

I think it's okay not knowing what you want to become.

I was going to be a lawyer, and I had studied hard, but then it suddenly occurred to me in a very deep, profound way that I didn't want to keep practicing law for the rest of my life.

Learning what you don't want to do is pretty valuable, it may be as valuable as figuring out what it is you do want to do.

Not sure of my place in the world (still up for debate) and not sure what I wanted to do with my life (not really up for debate).

I'm turning 22, so I want to start getting into work that reflects where I'm at in life now.

I never had the chance to consider what or how I wanted to be.

People go to college to find who they are as a person and find what they want to do in life, and I kind of already know that so it would be like I'd be taking a step back or something.

I know from experience that careers do not always arise from a deep sense of destiny.

I went through a lot of occupations. I was questioning my contribution to the world.

After college, I moved to Breckenridge, Colorado, and went snowboarding every day. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn't want to do. So I applied to grad school for writing, and I just gave it a shot and took it from there.

It's always good to find out what you don't want to do.

I don't know if acting is what I want to do for the rest of my life, it's just what I've, you know, ended up doing when I was little, and I've kinda grown up with it.

I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'

Sometimes, taking a job is like going to a shrink or something, where you get to know yourself better.

I spent the first 25 years of my life not knowing what I wanted to do.

I didn't have a bad experience on 'Gossip Girl,' by any means, but it was during a time in my life where I was looking at acting in not a very serious way. Which is no insult to 'Gossip Girl,' but that was a time in my life when I really didn't know if I wanted to act when I got out of school. It was like, 'OK, I got this part. I'll go do this.'

There were always moments where I'd say, 'What else can I do with my life?' But when I was 30 years old and discovered I could write - I wrote 'Black Cloud' in six weeks - it opened up a whole new world for me.

I have a really wide range of interests and I've still got time to work out my exact direction.

I've had a fast track to who I want to be. I know all of my friends are struggling to what to pick in college, and I've been given a fast pass to kick start my future.

I had no idea when I graduated from high school and then from graduate school what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea that I was ever going to be an actor.