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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty -
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
Eudora Welty
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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Eudora Welty -
The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.
Eudora Welty -
If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty -
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty -
Suppose you meet me in the woods.
Eudora Welty -
Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.
Eudora Welty
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Making reality real is art's responsibility.
Eudora Welty -
When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.
Eudora Welty -
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.
Eudora Welty -
The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Eudora Welty -
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
Eudora Welty -
One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
Eudora Welty
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The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
Eudora Welty -
Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
Eudora Welty -
Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
Eudora Welty -
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.
Eudora Welty -
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
Eudora Welty -
I was always my own teacher.
Eudora Welty
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Beware of a man with manners.
Eudora Welty -
Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty -
For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Eudora Welty -
A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
Eudora Welty