Eudora Welty Quotes
-
Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
-
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.
-
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.
-
William Eggleston sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.
-
The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
-
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.
-
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
-
Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
-
She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
-
A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
-
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
-
Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
-
Write about what you don't know about what you know.
-
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.