Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— 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…

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

“There is a term for people caught on a street crossing after the light has changed: "pedestrian-traffic residue".”

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they…

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

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

— Mavis Gallant

Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

— Mavis Gallant

“She was a pretty girl, with a pointed face and blue-black hair. But she was an untidy, a dusty sort of girl,…

— Mavis Gallant

“It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home. High time, you might say; but rebels…

— Mavis Gallant

She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of…

— Mavis Gallant

I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who…

— Mavis Gallant

... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.

— Mavis Gallant

A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

— Mavis Gallant

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

— Mavis Gallant

“All immigration is based on misapprehension.”

— Mavis Gallant