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

More quotes by Alice Munro

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Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
Alice Munro
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The constant happiness is curiosity.
Alice Munro
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The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.
Alice Munro
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As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities.
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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I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.
Alice Munro
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One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.
Alice Munro
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And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.
Alice Munro
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Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
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Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance class.
Alice Munro
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I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
Alice Munro
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It's as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome.
Alice Munro
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I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.
Alice Munro
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The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
Alice Munro
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I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.
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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People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.
Alice Munro
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She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.
Alice Munro
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The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Alice Munro
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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