38 Quotes by Mavis Gallant

My mother has lived every day of her life as if it were preparation for some kind of crisis.

The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out.

She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.