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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.

Alice Munro

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Alice Munro
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: January 1
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
Wingham
Ontario
Alice Ann Munro
Alice Ann Laidlaw
Alice Ann Laidlaw Munro
Alice Laidlaw
Alice Anne Munro
Writing
Twenties
Years
Means
Never
Else
Think
Didn
Thinking
Someone
Around
Selflessness
Mean
Fitted
Needs
Twenty

More quotes by Alice Munro

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It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
Alice Munro
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Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.
Alice Munro
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I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.
Alice Munro
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Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.
Alice Munro
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It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
Alice Munro
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Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?
Alice Munro
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For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.
Alice Munro
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I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.
Alice Munro
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And did I not think then, What nonsense it is to suppose one man so different from another when all that life really boils down to is getting a decent cup of coffee and room to stretch out in?
Alice Munro
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One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.
Alice Munro
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But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in.
Alice Munro
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A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
Alice Munro
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There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.
Alice Munro
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Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
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People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
Alice Munro
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She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.
Alice Munro
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Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.
Alice Munro
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Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance class.
Alice Munro
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So what about me? Would I always have to find a high horse? The moral relish, the rising above, the being in the right, which can make me flaunt my losses.
Alice Munro
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In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
Alice Munro