Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant, CC, née Young, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays...
interesting fascination life-is
All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another. Its fascination depends on how much is revealed, and in what manner.
jobs writing eight
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.
characters closer consists fiction fixed flash frame freeze image showing simple slide
The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image like a slide or closer still a freeze frame showing characters in a simple situation....
children believe writing
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?
book reading waiting
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.
real sadness people
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.
memories appeals
... appeals to memory were never perfectly answered.