Mavis Gallant Quotes

• I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.

  Mavis Gallant

  Jobs, Writing, Paris

  49 Copy quote

• Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

  Mavis Gallant

  Distance, Aging, Term

  Mavis Gallant (2011). “The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories”, p.90, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• A short story is what you see when you look out of the window.

  Mavis Gallant

  Looks, Stories, Window

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• Decide what the rest of your life is to be. Whatever you are now, you might be forever.

  Mavis Gallant

  Forever, Might, Rest Of Your Life

  Mavis Gallant (2016). “The Collected Stories”, p.647, Everyman's Library

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• All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.

  Mavis Gallant

  Interesting, Fascination, Life Is

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• Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?

  Mavis Gallant

  Art, Life And Death, Sculpture

  "Mavis Gallant obituary" by Christopher Hawtree, www.theguardian.com. February 18, 2014.

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• There are a great many opinions in this world, and a good half of them are professed by people who have never been in trouble.

  Mavis Gallant

  People, Half, World

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• Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express.

  Mavis Gallant

  Dream, Grief, Childhood

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• I write every day as a matter of course It is not a burden. It is the way I live.

  Mavis Gallant

  Writing, Matter, Way

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• A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct.

  Mavis Gallant

  Writing, Garden, House

  "Anglo‐Irish Vision" by avis Gallant, www.nytimes.com. January 15, 1978.

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• Writing is like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.

  Mavis Gallant

  Writing, Affair, Love Affair

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• I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.

  Mavis Gallant

  Notebook, Writing, Way

  Mavis Gallant (2016). “The Collected Stories”, p.58, Everyman's Library

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• There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

  Mavis Gallant

  Book, Reading, Waiting

  Mavis Gallant (2016). “The Collected Stories”, p.66, Everyman's Library

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• I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist. If it is child's play, an extension of make believe - something one is frequently assured by people who write about writing - how to account for the overriding wish to do that, just that, only that, and consider it as rational an occupation as riding a bicycle over the Alps?

  Mavis Gallant

  Children, Believe, Writing

  Mavis Gallant (2011). “Paris Stories”, p.366, New York Review of Books

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• [My father] had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy.

  Mavis Gallant

  Father, Blessed, Blood

  Mavis Gallant (2011). “Varieties of Exile”, p.136, New York Review of Books

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• No one is as real to me as people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them, as if the half-empty cafe were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.

  Mavis Gallant

  Real, Sadness, People

  "The Hunger Diaries" by Mavis Gallant, www.newyorker.com. July 9, 2012.

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• I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift.

  Mavis Gallant

  Dream, Father, Writing

  Mavis Gallant (2011). “Varieties of Exile”, p.136, New York Review of Books

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• ... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.

  Mavis Gallant

  Memories, Appeals

  Mavis Gallant (2016). “A Fairly Good Time: with Green Water, Green Sky”, p.52, New York Review of Books

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• She and Marie were Montreal girls, not trained to accompany heroes, or to hold out for dreams, but just to be patient.

  Mavis Gallant

  Girl, Patience, Dream

  Mavis Gallant (2011). “Varieties of Exile”, p.200, New York Review of Books

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