Alice Munro Quotes

All autobiography is fiction.

Memories are just stories we tell ourselves about our past; and that's often why they don't match when we've shared the same experiences with someone.

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

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

Memory is a powerful thing for a writer.

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

I've made up so many stores about my name, I can't remember.

Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.

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.

To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.

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.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.

True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory. I like the atmospheres that result if episodes are narrated through the haze of memory.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.

I'm very detail oriented. I think that's why people enjoy my memoirs - because I tend to remember everything.

No one ever sits you down at age eight and says, 'Aminatta, this is what's happened so far.' You have to work it out for yourself, and by the time you do, it's ancient history to many of the players. We're trying to make sense of the past, so we start to excavate our memories.

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.