Alice Munro Stories Quotations

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

The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

A story is not like a road to followit'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 it altered by being viewed from these windows.

I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn't fail.

I don't always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction. A story is not like a road to follow, it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while.