Mary Gaitskill Quotes

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

People misinterpret what I say all the time: They think I'm being offensive, when really, I'm only being opinionated.

I don't like making comparisons. You might say one slight thing, find yourself misinterpreted, and suddenly you're in trouble.

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.

Hindsight bias makes surprises vanish.

It's not important to how the band functions or to what we do. That's just many people's opinions on what they see. A lot of people project stuff on you, but that's okay.

No one can penetrate me. They only see what's in their own fancy, always.

People judged my work without to have listened to it.

People started saying, 'Oh you know, he's quicker than he looks', and I'm like, 'What does that mean? Do I look slow, or I'm not really sure what that means.

Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.

I take them seriously but I try not to read them. I take them personally, that's why I don't read them. I think people are lying when they say they don't care, that's not true. I take them personally.

If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

I think one of the major misconceptions about me is that I live my life the way people think I lead my life, with hot and cold drinks running everywhere and a party all the time. They think of my life in terms of certain excesses that don't really exist. Things are actually fairly simple.

If you hear the question wrong, you will answer wrong.

Who hears wrong, replies wrong.

I'm very much known as being the smiley girl, and unfortunately, lightness can be mistaken for stupidity or someone with no depth.

I think I have a deep-seated fear of being misunderstood. Or being misjudged.

The world's my oyster. But it worries me, all this showing off about being happy. Life is so precarious, and I know terrible things can happen. At the moment, everything is happy.

I don't think the guys I played with have ever had a problem with me. People can make up what they want to think.

The critics never see my role as it is - as a man protecting his garden killing poisonous snakes. Instead, they say it's just me again committing violence.

It doesn't make it any easier that people form opinions and make judgment calls and think I'm something that I'm not or do things that I don't.

People are going to assume whatever they want to assume.

There can be an easy way to interpret things some times and it seems like maybe I'm on the wrong side of those interpretations a lot of those times.