Quotes About Alice Munro

#1. I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.

Mariella Frostrup

#2. Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

Nell Freudenberger

#3. It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

Carol Windley

#4. I don't think she is underappreciated, certainly not among writers, but Alice Munro is the classic underappreciated writer among readers. It is almost a cliche now to wonder why this living legend is not more widely read.

Khaled Hosseini

#5. I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.

Ann Beattie

#6. Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]

Alice Munro

#7. I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

Amy Waldman

#8. I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

Nell Freudenberger

#9. Peggy Atwood, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Michael Ondaatje - these are all old friends from my early 20s.

Clark Blaise

#10. Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.

Cathleen Schine

#11. I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere ... I go into it, and
move back and forth
and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more
like a house.
Alice Munro on reading.

Alice Munro

#12. William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

Jennifer Haigh

#13. I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.

Emily Perkins

#14. Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

Julian Barnes

#15. My favorite short stories are by Alice Munro, especially her collections 'Carried Away' and 'Runaway.'

Hillary Clinton

#16. Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

Cynthia Ozick

#17. 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

#18. Everybody said to me back home, what do you want to go to Alaska for, and I said, because I've never been there, isn't that a good enough reason?

Alice Munro

#19. I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough.

Alice Munro

#20. Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Alice Munro

#21. All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be.

Alice Munro

#22. He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into.

Alice Munro

#23. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?

Alice Munro

#24. You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.

Alice Munro

#25. Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

Alice Munro

#26. Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.

Alice Munro

#27. The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.

Alice Munro

#28. All these jobs that seemed incidental and almost playful, on the borders of my real life, were going to move front and center.

Alice Munro

#29. I was young, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm.

Alice Munro

#30. 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

#31. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

Alice Munro

#32. Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.

Alice Munro

#33. How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn't get hold of it at all. I

Alice Munro

#34. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.

Alice Munro

#35. 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

#36. The relatives didn't feel slighted - they had a limited interest in people like Roy who had just married into the family, and not even contributed any children to it, and who were not like themselves. They were large, expansive, talkative. He was short, compact, quiet.

Alice Munro

#37. 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

#38. People doing something that seems to them natural and necessary. At least, one of them is doing what seems natural and necessary, and the other believes that the important thing is for that person to be free, to go ahead. They understand that other people

Alice Munro

#39. 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

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

Alice Munro

#41. I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

Alice Munro

#42. 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

#43. For later generations of women - post Sexual Revolution - enjoying sex was to become simply a duty, the perfect orgasm yet another thing to add to the list of required accomplishments; and when enjoyment becomes a duty, we're back in the land of dreariness of spirit.

Alice Munro

#44. My sister and I didn't know what that meant either but we were not equal to two questions in a row. And I knew that wasn't what rape meant anyway; it meant something dirty. "Purse. Purse stolen," said my mother in a festive but cautioning tone. Talk in our house was genteel.

Alice Munro

#45. Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?

Alice Munro

#46. Lived in curious but not unhappy isolation ... subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network which nobody around them listened to ...

Alice Munro

#47. Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan.

Alice Munro

#48. 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

#49. Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

Alice Munro

#50. Corrie said she was glad that what they were doing - what they had just done - appeared not to bother him, in spite of his belief. She said that she herself had never had any time for God, because her father was enough to cope with.

Alice Munro

#51. How am I supposed to know? She just wants to do it. You wait. You'll see. She'll get you over there bawling and whining about what a bastard I am. One of these days.

Alice Munro

#52. If you live long enough as a parent, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn't bother to know about as well as the ones you do know about, all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don't think my father felt anything like this.

Alice Munro

#53. It seemed to me that everybody ended up in Toronto at least for a little while.

Alice Munro

#54. Maybe it's an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can't help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn't such a muddle.

Alice Munro

#55. One stroke of lightning does not have to lead anywhere, but to the next stroke of lightning.

Alice Munro

#56. I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

Alice Munro

#57. Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown." And he replied, "Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way." Then

Alice Munro

#58. The work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life.

Alice Munro

#59. Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?

Alice Munro

#60. There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.

Alice Munro

#61. For what was living with a man if it wasn't living inside his insanity?

Alice Munro

#62. He says the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?

Alice Munro

#63. It would be better to think that time had soured and thinned and made commonplace a brew that used to sparkle, that difficulties had altered us both, and not for the better.

Alice Munro

#64. Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

Alice Munro

#65. What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.

Alice Munro

#66. WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.

Alice Munro

#67. These relatives of hers, the Boles and the Jetters and the Pooles, used to be around the house a lot, or else Lea wanted to be at one of their houses. It was a clan that didn't always enjoy one another's company but who made sure they got plenty of it.

Alice Munro

#68. 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

#69. My mother had a habit of hanging onto - even treasuring - the foibles of my distant infantile state.

Alice Munro

#70. Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid
it might as well be dead.

Alice Munro

#71. A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.

Alice Munro

#72. 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

#73. Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?

Alice Munro

#74. The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.

Alice Munro

#75. The dream was in fact a lot like the Vancouver weather - a dismal sort of longing, a rainy dreamy sadness, a weight that shifted round the heart.

Alice Munro

#76. If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.

Alice Munro

#77. My head was a magpie's nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

Alice Munro

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. Something that could not easily bu put into words and indeed might never be.

Alice Munro

#81. That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

Alice Munro

#82. Never in her life had this silly feeling of being enhanced by what she had put on herself.

Alice Munro

#83. Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

Alice Munro

#84. The constant happiness is curiosity.

Alice Munro

#85. He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

Alice Munro

#86. Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

Alice Munro

#87. You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.

Alice Munro

#88. It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love ... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.

Alice Munro

#89. What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.

Alice Munro

#90. 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

#91. Her father was outraged. Now you sell your stories, how soon before you will sell yourself?

Alice Munro

#92. He seemed happy. She thought that she seldom concerned herself about Laurence's being happy. She wanted him to be in a good mood, so that everything would go smoothly, but that was not the same thing.

Alice Munro

#93. The Shubert grandparents. No comfort there. He in uniform, she in a ball gown, displaying absurd self-satisfaction. They had got what they wanted, Sophia supposed, and had only contempt for those not so conniving or so lucky.

Alice Munro

#94. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as if I were a ship with their hope on it, dropping down over the horizon.

Alice Munro

#95. 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

#96. To dare it; to get away with it, to enter on preposterous adventures in your own, but newly named, skin.

Alice Munro

#97. I never have a problem with finding material. I wait for it to turn up, and it always turns up. It's dealing with the material I'm inundated with that poses the problem.

Alice Munro

#98. I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

Alice Munro

#99. It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom.

Alice Munro

#100. 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