Mary Gaitskill Quotes

When I was a teenager, you were either a punk, a skinhead or a mod, or you weren't on the scene. Me and my mates were skinheads.

Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them - you have to be like this or like that.

When the punk rock thing happened, I thought, 'Right, I have one chance here to be seen as part of some wider social phenomenon.'

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.

I'd loved to wear jeans and t-shirts, but everybody was in the peace movement back then. And that was my ploy. I had to be careful not to say things like 'I like meat.' Actually I just wanted to drink beer and to screw.

When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.

I thought I was a hippie, bro. I wore Birkenstocks every day. I went to a Christian high school, so I was pretty funky. The teachers didn't give me a hard time, though, even though I was totally way out of line in terms of my dress code.

There are constant challenges about what's 'mainstream.' These kids in 'Dope' are as mainstream as the kids in 'Superbad' or 'The Breakfast Club.'

I was too old to be a punk rocker. I was a mod, that's really the only youth tribe I ever belonged to - and even then, not for very long.

To be involved in the subculture of punk rock puts you in a minority.

There's nothing wrong with being a hippie.

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge.

I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square.

I turned to punk because I didn't fit in anywhere else.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Sex Pistols may come and go, but rebellion remains a key part of the rock n' roll experience. However, that rebellion - the outgrowth of a youthful search for independence and identity - doesn't always take the same form.

There's an irony about making a film about punk because punk isn't supposed to have feature films made about it.

I just wanted to do the things that all normal teenagers wanted to do. So I did become quite rebellious.

When I lived in England my perception of what people thought of me was largely formed by the media.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word 'nonconformist' was on there, and it said, 'Someone that doesn't appeal to society, someone who doesn't fit in.' We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.

I remember being really young - being 13 or 14 - when I first was really excited about punk rock as an idea, and I was like, 'Don't ever not be punk. Don't ever not be punk.' Telling that to myself, I guess it was like self-defense against the scary world around me.

It's like our little thing: you can take the girl out of the punk, but you can't take the punk out of the girl.

It depends on who you talk to if I'm part of the establishment or part of the antiestablishment.

For years, young adults have adopted extremely liberal world views in their attempts to be different, ultimately failing to see the irony that they've all become the same.