Top 30 Alice Munro Quotes

It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‘Read,’ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‘Don’t read, don’t think, just write,’ and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

I found it hard to be young. When I was married in my twenties, I hated being regarded as ‘the little wife.’ You don’t know what it was like then! I’d never even written a cheque. I had to ask my husband for money for groceries.

I’ve lived in a big showplace house, and I never want to live again in a house that overshadows me.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‘Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.’ You have no idea of the competition.

I can’t play bridge. I don’t play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn’t seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

‘The New Yorker’ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

That’s something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

In many ways, I’ve been writing personal stories all my life.

I feel that I’ve done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‘what happens’ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

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 writing has to be fitted around it.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of ‘Lives of Girls and Women,’ I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I had my first baby at twenty-one.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

Housework never really bothered me… what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life… when you’re a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn’t the fact that you do the laundry.

I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves.

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 can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart.’ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.

The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

I read all the time, and I’m often struck by something I’m reading.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don’t ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I’m writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

I think, often, people who run away are people who got into things most enthusiastically, and then they want more. They just demand more of life than what is happening in the moment. Sometimes this is a great mistake, as it’s always a good deal different than you expect it.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.