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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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Alice Munro
Age: 94
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
Practice
Write
Stories
Thought
Writing
Years
Time
Till
Novel

More quotes by Alice Munro

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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
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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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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 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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Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?
Alice Munro
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I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
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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That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.
Alice Munro
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If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.
Alice Munro
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They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
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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In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
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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I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.
Alice Munro
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It’s just life. You can’t beat life.
Alice Munro
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When I told him on the phone that after all you and I would not be getting married, he said Oh-oh. Do you think you'll ever manage to get another one? If I'd objected to his saying that he would naturally have said it was a joke. And it was a joke. I have not managed to get another one but perhaps have not been in the best condition to try.
Alice Munro
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The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.
Alice Munro
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Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance class.
Alice Munro
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Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center, out of whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled a good deal (also scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions.
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