I found it hard to be young. When I was married in my twenties, I hated being regarded as ‘the little wife.’ You don’t know what it was like then! I’d never even written a cheque. I had to ask my husband for money for groceries. Alice Munro Read Quote
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 Read Quote
For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same. Alice Munro Read Quote
I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand. Alice Munro Read Quote
When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of ‘Lives of Girls and Women,’ I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned. Alice Munro Read Quote
While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were. Alice Munro Read Quote
People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now. Alice Munro Read Quote
I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people’s lives present themselves. Alice Munro Read Quote
I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive. Alice Munro Read Quote
