Alice Munro Quotes

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

Most people write a lot of autobiography, but when I came to write autobiography I discovered that nothing interesting had ever happened to me. So I had to take the situation and invent stories to go with it.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

It's actually easier to do autobiographical stories. The story is already there. It's a matter of carving away what doesn't fit rather than building up from nothing.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

My name is Daniel, and this is the first volume of my life story, which, hopefully, will be a very long and distinguished one. Who should you read it? Very good question. Maybe because this is your planet, and you have a right to know what's actually happening on it.

We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories, our memory tells us stories. That is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story.

An autobiography is the story of how a man thinks he lived.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

I write about true-life type things.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

The truth is, for however much my stories come out of things that have happened to me, they're not darkly or as deeply personal as someone like Marc Maron or a lot of comedians, but they are essentially my life and my interpretation of it.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

My mother always said that everyone should be required to write an autobiography of their lives.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

I hope I didn't bore you too much with my life story.

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.