Alice Munro

“A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house.”

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

“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real life. And your real life is your relationship with the world.”

“Love is not a tame thing.”

“In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something has happened. And then there are all the other places.”

“Shame is a wicked thing, a thing that runs and hides.”

“For we did not and do not remember people and things being sad, we remember seeing them being sad.”

“I think any life can be interesting, not just the dramatic ones.”

“What you have to do is work with the raw material you have, which is your life.”

“The conversation of human beings is largely meaningless.”

“Every final thing is a cancellation of the things that went before.”

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”

“Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.”

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

“The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless.”

“People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.”

“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind… When a woman goes out of the room, she carries everything that happened in it along with her.”

“This is what I think has to be created in a short story. A world seen in a quick flash, as if through a camera lens.”

“A story should be a surprising thing.”

“He is not a person who is a DNF (did not finish). He is a person who does not start.”