Mary Gaitskill Quotes

People make me feel like I have a problem because I haven't had a kid yet.

I think a lot of women feel pressure to have kids, especially when you get engaged. And for me, I'm like, I don't want that pressure on myself.

As a woman of a certain age - and really, ever since I hit puberty and my baby-making parts were suddenly subject to public debate - I've been told over and over again that I will 'change my mind' about not wanting kids.

A woman who doesn't want to have kids is sort of a mystery to people. That's a question they're asked the minute they get married, it's a question they're asked constantly, 'Don't you want to have kids?' And I feel like that's completely unfair.

Stop baby shaming people to make us feel like there's something wrong with us if we don't want children.

When it comes to having children or not having children, I don't think we realise how many women have to deal with things quietly.

I'm not that big a fan of marriage as an institution and I don't know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.

I don't have any regrets about not having had children. What's the point? It's just something else to beat yourself up over.

I think I became more productive through not having children. I never really had the desire to have them. My husband didn't want them either, so it worked out well.

I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else.

I think that so many people who have children seem to want other people to have children in order to make their choice feel more essential, more inevitable, and just more right.

Women today have choices and demand choices, choices to have kids or not and the reproductive technology thereto. And it is a fact [that] most women continue to chose to have children.

I wanted people not to look at me as a little girl, but I was a little girl so how could I ask the world not to?

When I last looked, there weren't queues of eager guys under 40 hanging outside single ladies' doors begging them to give up work and have their babies. It takes two to tango and the same number, without medical help, to make a child.

We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them.

If people see me in some sort of niche, then that's fine. As long as it's not The Naked Guy, I don't care.

I had a beautiful mother and a famous father, and I didn't know where I fit in.

I know plenty of people who don't have children. And I also get a lot of people who say, 'Thank you for speaking out; my family don't understand why I don't want kids.'

I remember Tom Stoppard saying to me when I came out, 'I feel so sorry for you, because you'll never have children.' These days I would say, 'Well, why not, Tom?'

In my late teens and early twenties, I thought having children was possibly the most irresponsible thing you could do because I thought that the world was a dreadful place; I thought the sooner we all got off the planet, the better.

Money is a tremendous advantage in just about everything, but in terms of reproduction, if you're a poor woman and you are infertile, it's like too bad, so sad. And if you are a wealthy woman, you can kind of buy whatever you want.

I've noticed women my age and a little younger, anywhere from 35 to 50, saying, 'Who would want to bring kids into a world like this?' Or, 'I don't want to spend my life that way. I want to do my artwork.' And they're very unapologetically stating this.

We must re-stigmatize illegitimacy.

The more affluent women become, the less likely they are to have more children

Most women I've ever met either already have or at some point want kids, but there are still significant numbers who don't, or at least don't right now. But those variations are beside the point - the real point is that among all those women, having or wanting kids or not, I never met a single one who didn't want the choice.