Alice Munro Quotes

I read a lot of fiction.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

The structure of 'March' was laid down for me before the first line was written, because my character has to exist within Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' plotline.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

One reason I find all this character growth and narrative swerving so exhilarating is because I never got to do it when I wrote for TV. Our characters needed to remain consistent from week to week.

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

It took a lot to understand that the interest in both writing a story and reading it is not in the objective dangers someone takes. You don't have to fight snakes or wake up in a strange apartment to have a story; it's about what goes on inside your mind and soul.

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

My writing is a very authentic journey of discovery. I'm going out there to learn who I am. My readers, consequently, take the same journey as my protagonist.

I never write my stories as a wake-up call as such. I simply explore the kinds of situations that I find personally challenging by placing characters into situations that challenge them in similar ways.

I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

If you're a writer, and you write fiction, that's not all you read.

Personally, I love books, and I am interested in the notion that stories are told better in different media depending on the story.

I always wanted to be a writer. In the beginning, I thought I had to rewrite 'Gone with the Wind,' but eventually, I found my way and realized that wasn't me.

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

I leave the story room to grow into what the movie is driving me to do.

I'm always so inspired by Jeff Eastin's writing.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

There are always interesting, innovative, dynamic stories being written and being published. They're not always being prominently published, but they're being published.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.