Mavis Gallant Quotations

I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.

I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.

... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.

[My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.