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…

- Mavis Gallant

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…

- Mavis Gallant

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 — …

- Mavis Gallant

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

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

- Mavis Gallant

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…

- Mavis Gallant

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

- Mavis Gallant

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

- Mavis Gallant

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