Quote

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

Alice Munro

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Years
Time
Till
Novel
Practice
Write
Stories
Thought

More quotes by Alice Munro

Image
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
Image
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
Image
People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.
Alice Munro
Image
I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd I would never take the consequences of interfering with it.
Alice Munro
Image
Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
Alice Munro
Image
Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.
Alice Munro
Image
Speculation can be more gentle, can take its time, when it is not driven by desire.
Alice Munro
Image
Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.
Alice Munro
Image
I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
I would have a flick of fear, as in a dream when you find yourself in the wrong building or have forgotten the time for the exam and understand that this is only the tip of some shadowy cataclysm or lifelong mistake.
Alice Munro
Image
Pots can show malice, the patterns of linoleum can leer up at you, treachery is the other side of dailiness.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
Alice Munro
Image
Things have changed, ofcourse. There are counsellors at the ready. Kindness and understanding. Life is harder for some, we're told. Not their fault, even if the blows are purely imgainery. Felt just as keenly by the recipient, or the non recipient, as the case may be. But good use can be made of everything, if you are willing.
Alice Munro