350 Quotes by Alice Munro

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.

'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.

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.

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 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.

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

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn't breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children's mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that's the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don't understand.