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" 'Royal Beatings' was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to 'The New Yorker' in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. 'The New Yorker' sent me nice notes, though - penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren't terribly encouraging. "

" The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple. "

Alice Munro

Simple

Within

Mean

" My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be. "

" Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change. "

" I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don't ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I'm writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell. "

" I want the reader to feel something is astonishing - not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me. "

Alice Munro

Short

Story

" One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, 'Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.' You have no idea of the competition. "

" In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward. "

" I don't think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I'm enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living. "

Alice Munro

Life

Courage

" That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings. "

" In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it. "

" Housework never really bothered me... what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life... when you're a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn't the fact that you do the laundry. "

" Writers are always writing about infidelity. It's so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you're also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it's just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion. "

" I've lived in a big showplace house, and I never want to live again in a house that overshadows me. "

Alice Munro

Want

Lived

" I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window. "

" Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story. "

" For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn't be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It's a surprise to me that this hasn't happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same. "

" I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people. "

" I had my first baby at twenty-one. "

" I like gaps; all my stories have gaps. It seems this is the way people's lives present themselves. "

" I've often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn't really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn't seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive. "

" In those early days, the important thing was the happy ending. I did not tolerate unhappy endings - for my heroines, anyway. And later on, I began to read things like 'Wuthering Heights,' and very, very unhappy endings would take place, so I changed my ideas completely and went in for the tragic, which I enjoyed. "

Alice Munro

Place

Ideas

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

" I got interested in reading very early, because a story was read to me, by Hans Christian Andersen, which was 'The Little Mermaid,' and I don't know if you remember 'The Little Mermaid,' but it's dreadfully sad. The little mermaid falls in love with this prince, but she cannot marry him because she is a mermaid. "