Alice Munro

"A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."

"I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was 'The Little Mermaid,' and I don't know if you remember 'The Little Mermaid,' but it's dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid."

"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."

"I don't think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I'm enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living."

"Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change."

"Housework never really bothered me... what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life... when you're a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn't the fact that you do the laundry."

"Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having even if the parting has to come sooner or later."

"He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into."

"Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement thatyou were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion—calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain ofthe cold continued to wash into your body."

"If you live long enough as a parent nowadays, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn't bother to know about along with the ones you do know about all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself."

"Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace stood in their doorway, ceremoniously, to watch me go, and I felt as if I were a ship with their hope on it, dropping down over the horizon."

"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 quite be able to quit."

"Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about."

"Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later."

"Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final s"

"I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me."

"Why is there always this twitchiness, when you introduce a man to a woman friend, about whether the man will be bored or put off?"

"To be a femme fatale you don't have to be slinky and sensuous and disastrously beautiful, you just have to have the will to disturb."

"I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all."

"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."