Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant, CC, née Young, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays...
notebook writing way
I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.
camps full goes life loaded seldom
She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.
writing matter way
I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.
girl patience dream
She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.
dream grief childhood
Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.
writing garden house
A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.
dream father writing
I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.
people half world
There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.
real sadness people
No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.
memories appeals
... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.
father blessed blood
[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.
book reading waiting
There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.
children believe writing
I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe - something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?
stories looks window
A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.