There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if… — Mavis Gallant Copy Share Image
“Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” — Mavis Gallant Copy Share Image
“Like his father, like Jules Renard, he had been carried along the slow, steady swindle of history and experience.” — Mavis Gallant Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
[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 Copy Share Image
“There is a term for people caught on a street crossing after the light has changed: "pedestrian-traffic residue".” — Mavis Gallant Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live. — Mavis Gallant Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“My mother has lived every day of her life as if it were preparation for some kind of crisis.” — Mavis Gallant Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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