Death is a big theme in the book, illness. What is that? It's a fact that human beings … - Mary Gaitskill

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What works for me is that I read widely and stay focused on my writing. I'm no longer concerned about what happens in the literary marketplace. It is distracting and can lead to discontent.

Mary Gaitskill

Death is a big theme in the book, illness. What is that? It's a fact that human beings - no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are - are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that's a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around.

Beautiful, Book, Fact, Idea, Strong

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That's why every society on the planet has very definite rules, ideas about how sex should be regulated, how sex should be expressed, what's okay, what's not okay. And I guess we do live in a place, and have for a long time, where there's more openness and there's more willingness to tolerate different kinds of behavior, but with that comes people creating other rules and other kinds of controls. It's always going to be a question of what's acceptable and what isn't and what's the danger point and what rouses people's contempt and what people are allowed to get away with.

Different, Kinds, Live, Long, People

Sexuality is a place where people are very vulnerable and can be experiencing and embodying very raw forces that they don't really understand and there's a question of how much you should control and how much you should play with those and what those forces really are, how you really feel about them. That's perennial.

Control, People, Perennial, Sexuality, Vulnerable

My ambition was to live like music.

Ambition, Like, Music, My Ambition

I think people try to make the most of their time on earth and also to fix their time on earth. They try to fix external verities, things that are true for all time, ideas that are true for all time: Rome will last forever! America will last forever! Beauty, as defined by the fashion industry, is one of those things—this is beautiful. This will always be beautiful—and hold it in a way that has some sense of permanence about it, and absoluteness. And yet it’s not.

Beautiful, Fashion, Ideas, Thinking, Verities

But now all the natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely that the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells.

Laboratory, Loss, Order, Remove, Turtles