"I still do not know what impels anyone……" — Mavis Gallant
"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. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe - something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?"
—
Mavis Gallant
★
★
★
★
★
0.0 avg (0 ratings)
16 Quotes by Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant has 16 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
-
Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled...
-
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,…
-
Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.…
-
No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I…
-
I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not…
-
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…
-
There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many…
-
She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to…
-
Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the…
-
A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.
See all 16 quotes by Mavis Gallant »
More Account Quotes
This quote is filed under Account Quotes,
one of 1,306 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
-
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but…
— Isaac Asimov
-
A soul which gives itself to prayer, either much or little, should on no account be kept within narrow bounds.
— Teresa of Avila
-
It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited…
— Douglas Adams
-
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
— Douglas Adams
-
Do not measure your loss by itself; if you do, it will seem intolerable; but if you will take all…
— Saint Basil
-
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
— Max Beerbohm
-
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we…
— Saul Bellow
-
To me, it really seems visible today that ethics is not something exterior to the economy, which, as technical matter,…
— Pope Benedict XVI
-
I've never had a bank account in Switzerland since 1984. Why would the Swiss do this to me? Maybe the…
— Benazir Bhutto
-
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers,…
— Ambrose Bierce
-
Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.
— Ambrose Bierce
-
In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in…
— Harry A. Blackmun
See all 1,306 Account Quotes »