Quotes by Alice Munro

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

“Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.”

“Thats something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.”

“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.”

“The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when theyre gone, but your children are still going to be here, and youre going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.”

“The stories are not autobiographical, but theyre personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that Ive learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.”

“When Im doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it on the computer I can get carried away, and I try to go as far as I can every day, as if I were going to die in the night or something.”

“Sometimes I read one of my stories, maybe one that I wrote thirty years ago, and I think, Now Id go and do it differently. Or I think I would just alter a phrase that seems to me a little too polished or too sharp or too smart-aleck or something. Or too ironic. Irony was so big then that it got under your skin and you sort of didnt recognize it.”

“The Love of a Good Women.”

“Im sorry Im not able to be here. It is this attention of yours that has helped me to flourish for the past couple of decades, as an unapologetic writer of short fiction.”

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.

She did not have time to wonder about his being late. He died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood out in front of the hardware store... He had not even had time to get into the store...

A story is not like a road to follow … its more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

I cant play bridge. I dont play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasnt seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid and have it taken from you.

I began to understand that there were certain talkers--certain girls--whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people--people like me--who didnt concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

To be a femme fatale you dont have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb.

Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?

I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me.