Mary Gaitskill Quotes

That's what writing is all about, after all, making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there.

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.

I'm not really a full-time director, I just like to direct the things that I write because I think I'm going to know it better than someone else.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

It [film-making] really just has to do with my own ghosts and phantoms. And I have to say, in the end, it's just my way of seeing things.

It's pretty much rock-'n'-roll. I sit down and start feeling stuff and writing.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

I don't really analyze my stuff when I write. I write about stuff that I'm interested in, that I'm feeling at that particular time. When I stand back and look at the complete work, I might see themes that run through the whole film, but I'm not really conscious of it when I'm doing it.

My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing. I write in words. I don write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors. I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.

I'm gonna write from personal experience, from emotion, from whatever the hell I'm feeling that day.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

Writing is a combination of being alert to your outer surroundings and alive to your inner reality.

The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.

Whenever I write, I only write about what I know or what I have experienced or feeling.

I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.