Mary Gaitskill Quotes

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

I like to play with tropes.

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.

The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

I don't like allegory.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Sci-fi's great, but you don't have to hit people over the head with it when you're making a social comment. It just inherently exists within the fabric of the story.

I think that the audience is smart enough to know that just because a drama is relating to real-world parallels, it doesn't mean that its story is exactly that story.

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.