Alice Munro

“My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.”

“Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.”

“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.”

“In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.”

“Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.”

“I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion, a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily and bountifully that even if it is rejected he can move along as buoyantly as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that, inexperienced as I was. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable façade of life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“Her attitude towards sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners--something that shouldn't interfere with people's being kind and cheerful to each other.”

“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.”

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

“הרבה יותר מדי דברים קורים בעת ובעונה אחת; וגם יותר מדי אנשים. תחשבי, הוא אמר לה. מה הדבר הכי חשוב? למה את רוצה שנשים לב? תחשבי.”

“גבר עם משקפת מביט בגבר עם משקפת שמביט באישה. סצינה מסרט. קומדיה. הוא לא ידע לאן ללכת. הוא לא היה מסוגל לצאת אל החצר ולעצור את זה.”

“ראתה שם מישהו שהזכיר לה גבר שהיתה מאוהבת בו — לא, אולי מדויק יותר לומר שהוקסמה ממנו — לפני שנים רבות.”