Alice Munro Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish.

  Alice Munro

  Moving, Writing, Mean

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Oct 01, 2014

• 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

  Writing, Bridges, Play

  "Go ask Alise". Interview with Newyorker, www.newyorker.com. February 19, 2001.

• If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Thinking, Somewhere Else

  Alice Munro (1999). “The love of a good woman: stories”, Penguin, 1999

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

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Thinking, Growing

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Jul 17, 2016

• 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

  Writing, Important, World

• 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.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, People, Anecdotes

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Sep 17, 2011

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

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Enjoy, Hard

• 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.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Thinking, People

  FaceBook post by Alice Munro from Jul 09, 2011

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

  Alice Munro

  Moving, Writing, People

• You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Stories, Crafts

• 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

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

• 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

  Writing, Trying, Stories

• 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

  Wall, Pain, Writing

• 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.

  Alice Munro

  Memories, Writing, Anecdotes

• 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

  Children, Home, Writing

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

  Alice Munro

  Writing, Years, Practice

  "Canada's Alice Munro, 'master' of short stories, wins Nobel Prize in literature" By Joe Sterling, Ben Brumfield, www.cnn.com. October 10, 2013.

• 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

  Writing, One Day, Would Be

• 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

  Notebook, Writing, Long

• Naturally my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by "feminist." In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I'm a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not. I think I'm a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism.

  Alice Munro

  Mean, Writing, Men

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