Alice Munro
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munrois a Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize winner. Munro's work has been described as having revolutionized the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 July 1931
CountryCanada
book reading dust
It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.
notebook writing giving
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.
moving writing people
I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
writing years practice
For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
shelter stories sturdy
A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
jobs children real
I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide - sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.
everything-happens-for-a-reason long fiction
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.
fighting silence facts
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.
rooms done realization
There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.
writing people anecdotes
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.
writing thinking people
It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.
writing bridges play
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.
memories people stories
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
people soul be-kind
Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.