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Writer Quotes by Eudora Welty

41 Writer quotes by Eudora Welty

All Writer quotes Eudora Welty’s page

Eudora Welty notes that great fiction often leaves questions unanswered, putting humanity before clear answers. She stresses that good writing must stay steady and lucid from start to finish. She also believes a novelist’s job is to make the story alive, not just report it.

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There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

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Human life is fiction's only theme.

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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

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Write about what you don't know about what you know.

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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.

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I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

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At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself either; I write for it, for the pleasure of…

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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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“I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all…

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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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To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

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“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there…

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Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion…

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Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

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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…

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“Once you're into a story everything seems to apply- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would…

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What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a…

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I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper…

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No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down,…

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Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by…

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“Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of…

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“There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what…

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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…

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A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject…

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My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed…

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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…

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“Two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle.…

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“What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human…

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I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute…

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It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The…

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“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be…

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“There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of. In the 1960's, in my home town of Jackson, the civil…

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“The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the…

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“I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It…

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“I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other”

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I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all…

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Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's…

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“My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision…

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The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write…

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More by Eudora Welty

“She (my mother) could still recite them (the poems) in full when she was lying helpless and nearly blind, in her bed, an old…

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an…

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the…

“Two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the…

“When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him.”

“Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing, once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.”

“All children in those small-town, unhurried days had a vast inner life going on in the movies. Children were allowed to go without chaperone…

“At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.”

“We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to…

“Could she ever be, would she be, where she was going?”

“When one of us (children) caught measles or whooping cough and we were isolated in bad upstairs, we wrote notes to each other perhaps…

“She (my mother) stood always prepared in herself to challenge the world in our place. She did indeed tend to make the world look…

“For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.”

“In children's art class we sat in a ring of kindergarten chairs and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the…

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.