Quotes About Alice Munro

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

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.

This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.

She hated to hear the word escape used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn't just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.

She hoped he wouldn't ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical.

Dorothy," said my mother, shifting gears with an angry little spurt, and we cleared the top of the hill

china and her decorating scheme and her flower garden and even on the books in her bookcase. She would live now, not read.

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.

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.

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

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

'The New Yorker' was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I'd more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions - not much.

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.

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 is an atomic writer blasting doors into narrative time.

Furthermore, in a new study reported in the journal Science, subjects who read Alice Munro stories—specifically, the collection Too Much Happiness—demonstrated sharper social and psychological insight than those who did not.

In many ways, I've been writing personal stories all my life.