Eudora Welty Quotes
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
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Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
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Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.
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Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
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To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
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Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.
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I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
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Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?
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Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.
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Out of love you can speak with straight fury.
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At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it.
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I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
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Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
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Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.
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William Eggleston sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.
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The very greatest mystery is in unsheathed reality itself.
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I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
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I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.
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Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
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Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way...Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.
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Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
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Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
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Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.
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Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.