Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. 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 Read Quote
I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart.’ My mother was an exception to this rule and was punished by the early onset of Parkinson’s disease. Alice Munro Read Quote
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. Alice Munro Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple. Alice Munro Read Quote
Royal Beatings’ was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to ‘The New Yorker’ in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. ‘The New Yorker’ sent me nice notes, though – penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging. Alice Munro Read Quote
My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be. Alice Munro Read Quote
I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles. Alice Munro Read Quote
