Eudora Welty Quotes
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There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
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Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
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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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Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
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Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.
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The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.
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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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Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
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Time is anonymous; when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
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The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again
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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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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
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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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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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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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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.
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The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
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The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
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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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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.
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Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
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I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.