Eudora Welty Quotes
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Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
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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 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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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
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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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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
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Suppose you meet me in the woods.
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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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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
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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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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 sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
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Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
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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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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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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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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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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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For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
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I was always my own teacher.