Alice Munro Quotes

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Alice Munro

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 10, 1931

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

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

Alice Munro

William Maxwell's my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for 'The New Yorker' called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in 'The New Yorker' in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did - about emotions and places.

Alice Munro

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.

Alice Munro

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

Alice Munro

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don't think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

Alice Munro

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

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You've got to go your own way, and that's what I did.

Alice Munro

I had my first baby at twenty-one.

Alice Munro

'Lives' is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material - and after that, you're not sure what you can do.

Alice Munro

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, 'Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.' You have no idea of the competition.

Alice Munro

I can have people around a lot more because I'm not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

Alice Munro

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I've got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

Alice Munro