Quotes from Alice Munro

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.

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.

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

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

Naturally, my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by 'feminist.' In the beginning, I used to say, 'Well, of course I'm a feminist.' But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not.

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.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.

Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.

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.

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.

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.

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?

And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.

'Royal Beatings' was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to 'The New Yorker' in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. 'The New Yorker' sent me nice notes, though - penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren't terribly encouraging.

'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.

William Maxwell's my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for 'The New Yorker' called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in 'The New Yorker' in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did - about emotions and places.

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.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

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

What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it".