Mavis Gallant Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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

Mavis Gallant
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
A short story is what you see when you look out the window. It can't encompass more than that, or it's not a short story anymore.

Mavis Gallant
The vocation exists, and so does the gift; but vocation and gift are seldom of equal proportions, and I suppose that the struggle to equate them is the true and secret tension.

Mavis Gallant
Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.

Mavis Gallant
Now that he was rich he was not thought ignorant any more, but simply eccentric.

Mavis Gallant
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
I don't think I've ever written anything that isn't funny for me. And everything in life has the element of farce. Those fits of hysteria you get at funerals, the laughter, for example, they're very hard to control.

Mavis Gallant
A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct. It is the business of critical biography to make the two overlap—to bring some of the furniture out to the garden, as it were, and spread flowers all over the house.

Mavis Gallant
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
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
She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.

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

Mavis Gallant
Appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.

Mavis Gallant
I don't think life is sad. I think the difficulties between people are sad and inevitable, but I don't think I would ever begin by thinking I'm going to write something sad and make people miserable. I just think I'm going to write something funny. There's always something that makes me laugh.

Mavis Gallant
In many, many of the things I write, someone has vanished. And it's often the father. And there is often a sense that nothing is very safe.

Mavis Gallant
Unconsciously, everyone under the age of 10 knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocrisy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.

Mavis Gallant