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Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

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
Good
Generally
People
Finally
Story
Comes
Stories
Thought
Writing
Anecdotes
Make
Underneath

More quotes by Alice Munro

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You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
Alice Munro
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What if people really did that - sent their love through the mail to get rid of it? What would it be that they sent? A box of chocolates with centers like the yolks of turkey eggs. A mud doll with hollow eye sockets. A heap of roses slightly more fragrant than rotten. A package wrapped in bloody newspaper that nobody would want to open.
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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Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.
Alice Munro
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The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
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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It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
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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The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.
Alice Munro
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Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
Alice Munro
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Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.
Alice Munro
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I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.
Alice Munro
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She would live now, not read.
Alice Munro
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I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.
Alice Munro
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Luck took me right out of myself - I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising but always responsible, no tricks for tricks' sake so satisfying, with its shifting and puzzles. So much fiction turns out to be diversion, in spite of fancy claims, and doesn't really look at anything. Well - this does.
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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What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.
Alice Munro
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People are curious. A few people are. ... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
Alice Munro
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This is the way you look at the poorest details of the world resurfaced, after you've been driving for a long time -- you feel their singleness and precise location and the forlorn coincidence of you being there to see them.
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