"Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own li...
Human life is fiction's only theme.
More Eudora Welty quotes
"There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up ...
"We do need to bring to our writing, over and over again, all the abundance we possess. To be able, to be ready, to enter into the minds and hearts of ...
"Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own li...
"Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings...
"A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began writing stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the ...
"In real life I fell easily under the spell of all traveling artists. En route to New Orleans, entertainments of many kinds would stop over in those da...
"For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, ...
"Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be br...
"What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I no...
"Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence...
"Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a...
"I didn't hit other people or hit purposefully, I just hit. Some object would be at fault. My anger was at myself, every time, all vanity. As an adoles...
"I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling ...