Alice Munro

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You've got to go your own way, and that's what I did.

That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don't think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, 'Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.' You have no idea of the competition.

In those early days, the important thing was the happy ending. I did not tolerate unhappy endings - for my heroines, anyway. And later on, I began to read things like 'Wuthering Heights,' and very, very unhappy endings would take place, so I changed my ideas completely and went in for the tragic, which I enjoyed.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren't taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

William Maxwell's my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for 'The New Yorker' called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in 'The New Yorker' in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did - about emotions and places.

I found it hard to be young. When I was married in my twenties, I hated being regarded as 'the little wife.' You don't know what it was like then! I'd never even written a cheque. I had to ask my husband for money for groceries.