Alice Munro Quotes

105 quotes in 1622 categories

• Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
• You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
• I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind…
• A story is not like a road to followit's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and…
• Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
• I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
• What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent?…
• The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
• Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been…
• I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you…
• For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
• I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you…
• It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because…
• Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
• I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
• A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
• Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.
• It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I…
• Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing,…
• That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

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