Alice Munro People Quotations

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.

Now i no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

She keeps on hoping from a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.

Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

There were people whom you positively ached to please. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could kee you and have contempt for you forever.

Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.

people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one

People have thoughts they’d sooner not have. It happens in life.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

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 be able to quit.

Never underestimate the meanness in people's souls... Even when they're being kind... especially when they're being kind.

Life would be grand if it weren't for the people.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.