Mavis Gallant - Life Quotes

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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

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

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

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 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

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