There is a term for people caught on a street crossing…

“Like his father, like Jules Renard, he had been carried along the slow, steady swindle of history and experience.”

— Mavis Gallant

“If you listen at doors, you hear what you deserve.”

— Mavis Gallant

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled…

— Mavis Gallant

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as…

— Mavis Gallant

“My mother has lived every day of her life as if it were preparation for some kind of crisis.”

— Mavis Gallant

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not…

— Mavis Gallant

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

— Mavis Gallant

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth…

— Mavis Gallant

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

— Mavis Gallant

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even…

— Mavis Gallant

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

— Mavis Gallant

“If your life isn't exactly the way you want it to be by the time you are forty-five," said Walter's father, whom he admired,…

— Mavis Gallant

“Converts have it soft," said Mary. "They come to it late, without ever having had the Devil under the bed. They sail in and…

— Mavis Gallant

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled...

— Mavis Gallant

There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion.…

— Mavis Gallant