Alice Munro Quotes

Most of the memorable events I have myself been exercised in; and, for the satisfaction of the public, will briefly relate the circumstances of my adventures, and scenes of life, from my first movement to this country until this day.

I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things.

I was worried that one day, 40 years from now, I would look back and wouldn't be able to remember the details of my life, so I've written them all down.

'Blue Plate Special' is the autobiography of my first half-century of life, with food as the subject.

I think the best thing that I collect is memories. I love traveling; I love remembering stuff, my family, my daughter, my wife. I just love collecting memories of my trips, my experiences. And I think that's it. I'm not very glued to material stuff.

I'm in a position to look back at my life, and I realized there were a number of experiences that needed to be documented.

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

When I want to check out how my life's been, I go through my albums. They steps in my life.

Each piece of jewellery tells a story of my life. Picking one particular piece as a favorite would be like taking a chapter out of a book.

When I look back on my life, it seems nearly everything of interest happened in little more than one decade - dramas, tragedies, major events, pleasures, my close friendships with artists and political figures, the lovely places where I lived in England and New York, the trips to Europe, visits at the White House.

I may have crossed three-fourths of my life and I felt it would be worth jotting down my life in movies spanning decades.

When I'm driving past the place I used to work, or when I'm driving past the comedy studio where I used to take photos in exchange for classes, or when I'm driving past the yoga studio I used to clean on the weekends - it's not that far removed from me yet. I get very sentimental over things like that.

I've always been of the party that rubbished the idea of a definitive account of somebody's life.

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

Our past absolutely defines everything we do in the present. We can't help it. We're made by the events of our past, so there's no escaping it.

Little things happen to us during the course of our lives when we were children that stay with us.

some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.

I have no desire to write my own biography, as long as I have strength and means to do better work.

So often, over the course of our day-to-days, we forget the details of what shapes us most in life. Sure, we'll pay through the nose to have our weddings videotaped, but can we say the same thing about the first time we discovered masturbation, or the moment we realized that the true nature of the opposite sex is to lie and humiliate (and I'm not just talking about women here)? Usually not.

It has been suggested that an account of my life and fortunes would not be uninteresting to the public.

I have touched more men that I can count. Some with my lips, more with my axe.

After all, it's all kinds of things that make up a life, right? The big, like falling in love and spending time with your family, and the little....like blow drying your hair, applying concealer, and cursing those magazine inserts. It all counts. It has to.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

Often your face is your autobiography