38 Quotes by Mavis Gallant

All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image like a slide or closer still a freeze frame showing characters in a simple situation....

All immigration is based on misapprehension.

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

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story – or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall – is, Is it dead or alive?

Converts have it soft,” said Mary. “They come to it late, without ever having had the Devil under the bed. They sail in and admire the stained-glass windows. All the dirty work has been done.

It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home. High time, you might say; but rebels can’t always be choosers.

There is a term for people caught on a street crossing after the light has changed: “pedestrian-traffic residue”.