Eudora Welty Quotes
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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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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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Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
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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 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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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
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I'm a great reader that never has time to read.
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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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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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A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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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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A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
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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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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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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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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
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Suppose you meet me in the woods.
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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
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Beware of a man with manners.
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
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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.