Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Alice Munro

Literary Birthday – 10 July – Alice Munro

Alice Munro was born 10 July 1931 and died 13 May 2024.

Alice Munro Quotes

  1. 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.
  2. There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this. (The Moons of Jupiter)
  3. Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew very well.
  4. I write every morning, seven days a week. I write starting about eight o’clock and finish up around eleven. Then I do other things the rest of the day, unless I do my final draft or something that I want to keep working on then I’ll work all day with little breaks.
  5. I am so compulsive that I have a quota of pages. If I know that I am going somewhere on a certain day, I will try to get those extra pages done ahead of time.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the ‘what happens’, but the way everything happens.
  9. 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.
  10. The constant happiness is curiosity.

Alice Munro was a Canadian author widely celebrated for her short stories. She won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy called her ‘a master of the contemporary short story’. Munro’s fiction often explores the lives, relationships, and private struggles of women in Toronto, small-town Ontario, and British Columbia. Her writing is admired for its clear, lyrical style and its ability to reveal the emotional depth of ordinary lives. Her best-known collections include Runaway, Dear Life: Stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, The Moons of Jupiter, and Friend of My Youth.

Source for image: MacDowell, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_Munro_2006_(cropped).jpg


by Amanda Patterson
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Posted on: 10th July 2013
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