Mary Gaitskill

It's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an obsession.

My ambition was to live like music.

Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker.

The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.

A sad person who is so involved with his sadness that he mistakes it for reality will have a hard time seeing himself as anything but sad. For him, the sadness is not a feeling that he experiences - it is him.

Something like riding a horse - which I've recently started doing - requires courage, especially for me, as I started out being actually scared of horses.

The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity.

I used to start at about 10 at night and work until early morning. My preferred way to work is to start in the early afternoon and work until about 3, go do errands, have dinner, and then write for a few more hours in the evening.

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings__t does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the theme of mortality versus a human wish for immortality of a sort. Take, for example, the definition of beauty in fashion. Remember what Alison says at the beginning? She says when she was young she didn__ know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didn__ even know what they were talking about. I experienced that when I was a child. If I loved someone I thought they were really beautiful. And then eventually, I began to get it, the social concept of beauty. Not that I think beautiful is completely imaginary, but beauty is so wide ranging and fluid. Yet there__ a need to say: __his is what it is, and it__ not changing; we__e taking a picture of it to hold it still._ It__ like an impulse to put up a building meant to last forever. An urge to grab and hold something in place when nothing human can be grabbed and held in place. We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct__yes, nose, mouth__nd then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it__ going to dissolve completely. It__ a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so we__e constantly trying to pin something down or leave a trace that will last forever. __nd this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita . . ._ What other immortality will anyone share?

If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

Dani said this woman, with whom she__ lived for two years, had never known her. __ feel like people accept the first thing I show them,_ she said, __nd that__ all I ever am to them.