Eudora Welty Quotes
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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.
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I'm a great reader that never has time to read.
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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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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 novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
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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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A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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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.
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A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
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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.
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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.
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One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.