Alice Munro

Row, row, row your boat. Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

— Alice Munro

“My mother had not let anything go. Inside that self we knew, which might at times appear blurred a bit, or sidetracked,…

— Alice Munro

I think, often, people who run away are people who got into things most enthusiastically, and then they want more. They just…

— Alice Munro

And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life…

— Alice Munro

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression…

— Alice Munro

“What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing.…

— Alice Munro

The constant happiness is curiosity.

— Alice Munro

'Lives' is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity…

— Alice Munro

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or…

— Alice Munro

“She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life…

— Alice Munro

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world,…

— Alice Munro

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

— Alice Munro

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story…

— Alice Munro

I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It’s dealing…

— Alice Munro

In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the…

— Alice Munro

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel,…

— Alice Munro

It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to…

— Alice Munro

I've often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn't really in the rhythm of the…

— Alice Munro

People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You…

— Alice Munro

I'm always trying. Between every book, I think, 'Well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff.'

— Alice Munro

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their…

— Alice Munro

“One's appreciation of meager comforts, it seems, depends on what misery one has gone through before getting them.”

— Alice Munro

She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn't altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn't…

— Alice Munro

It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on…

— Alice Munro

Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

— Alice Munro