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How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing.
Eudora Welty -
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
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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.
Eudora Welty -
I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.
Eudora Welty -
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.
Eudora Welty -
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
Eudora Welty -
To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
Eudora Welty -
I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
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No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
Eudora Welty -
Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.
Eudora Welty -
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.
Eudora Welty -
Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.
Eudora Welty -
But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.
Eudora Welty -
Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
Eudora Welty
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A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
Eudora Welty -
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
Eudora Welty -
I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.
Eudora Welty -
I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.
Eudora Welty -
Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
Eudora Welty -
All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
Eudora Welty -
I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty -
Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.
Eudora Welty -
Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
Eudora Welty