Quote

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

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
Like
Fame
Lived
Nobody
Knew
Small
Town
Writing
Famous
Things
Towns
Would
Liked

More quotes by Alice Munro

Image
There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.
Alice Munro
Image
I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
Alice Munro
Image
Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.
Alice Munro
Image
Peoples lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable-deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. . . . What I wanted [to write down] was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting.
Alice Munro
Image
The images, the language, of pornography, and romance are alike monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair.
Alice Munro
Image
The unhappiest moment I could never tell you. All our fights blend into each other and are in fact re-enactments of the same fight, in which we punish each other--I with words, Hugh with silence--for being each other. We never needed any more than that.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
Love removes the world for you, and just as surely when it's going well as when it's going badly.
Alice Munro
Image
I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same.
Alice Munro
Image
There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
The constant happiness is curiosity.
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
It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.
Alice Munro
Image
The skin of everyday appearances stretched over such shamelessness, such consuming explosions of lust.
Alice Munro
Image
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
Image
He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.
Alice Munro
Image
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
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
Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
Alice Munro