Eudora Welty Quotes - Page 5

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.

Reading Chekhov was just like the angels singing to me.

Plots are ... what the writer sees with.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.

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

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

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

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

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.

Beware of a man with manners.

A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains. Characters, setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story - you can work more by suggestion - than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.

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.

I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

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

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.