Irony – The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.
We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history – even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
Very few of my characters are based on people I’ve known. It is too constricting.
Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
There’s nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there’s something wrong with the young who can’t be fascinated by a genius.
To own a certain book – and to choose it without help – is to define yourself.
Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.
As I’ve explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.
In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.