Alice Munro Quotes

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.
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 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.
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.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
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.
That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?
For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn't be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It's a surprise to me that this hasn't happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.
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 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 don't think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I'm enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.
I feel that I've done what I wanted to do, and that makes me feel fairly content.
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 got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was 'The Little Mermaid,' and I don't know if you remember 'The Little Mermaid,' but it's dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid.
I had my first baby at twenty-one.
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
123next›last»
Total Records : 54

Related Books

Author Profile

Votes :
Rating :
AuthorName
Alice Munro
Profession
Writer
BirthDate
10 July, 1931
Country
Canada
View Profile

Share to your friends..

Related Author

Alan Bradley Alexi Zentner Alice Munro Carol Windley Cathy Marie Buchanan Charles de Lint David Rakoff Ed Greenwood Elizabeth Thornton Gavin McInnes Geoff Ryman George Woodcock Graham Yost James Nicoll Kelley Armstrong Kevin Patterson Nathan Fielder Robert J. Sawyer Rohinton Mistry Ryan North
view more

Popular Topics

Attitude Death Inspirational Life Love Motivational Nature Positive