Mavis Gallant Quotes

16 quotes in 335 categories

• Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled...
• I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.…
• Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.
• All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.
• Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking…
• No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist…
• I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply,…
• I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.
• I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by…
• 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…
• She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.
• Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief…
• A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.
• I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a…
• There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
• She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.

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