Literary Birthday – 11 August – Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant was born on 11 August 1922 and died on 18 February 2014.

Mavis Gallant Quotes

1. Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.
2. I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.
3. Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.
4. All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.
5. There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.
6. A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.
7. Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?
8. A writer’s life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.
9. No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realise they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty café were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.
10. I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

Mavis Gallant was a Canadian writer who spent time in France. She was well known as a short story writer, and also published novels, plays, and essays. She wrote Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, and The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories. Almost all of her work was published initially in The New Yorker magazine. Gallant explored alienation, exile, and the search for belonging, particularly through characters caught between cultures or far from home. She also wrote about family, relationships, memory, and loss, revealing the quiet ways people struggle to connect with one another and understand their own lives. In 1981, Gallant was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. She was promoted to Companion of the Order in 1993. In 2000, Gallant won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as a PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement.

Source for photograph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mavis_Gallant.png

by Amanda Patterson
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