Eudora Welty Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

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

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Honestly, Can Do

  "On Writing". Book by Eudora Welty, 2011.

• 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 of themselves like grass.

  Eudora Welty

  Appreciation, Book, Writing

  One Writer's Beginnings ch. 1 (1983)

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

  Eudora Welty

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Reading

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.60, Modern Library

• 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.

  Eudora Welty

  Grief, Flower, Writing

• No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

  Eudora Welty

  Art, Writing, Necks

  Eudora Welty (1998). “Stories, Essays, and Memoir”

• Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Heart, Character

  Eudora Welty (1995). “One Writer's Beginnings”, p.100, Harvard University Press

• 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, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Heart, Blessing

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.61, Modern Library

• To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Story Writers, Doe

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

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Knows

• The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Essence, Raw Materials

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.75, Modern Library

• 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.

  Eudora Welty

  Reading, Writing, Expression

  Eudora Welty (2002). “On Writing”, Random House Digital, Inc.

• The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Thinking, Challenges

• 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 sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.

  Eudora Welty

  Art, Memories, Writing

  Eudora Welty (2002). “On Writing”, Random House Digital, Inc.

• No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Clouds, Vagueness

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.50, Modern Library

• What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Novel, Knows

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.64, Modern Library

• There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.

  Eudora Welty

  Moving, Book, Writing

• Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Character, Doe

• 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 life.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Experience, Stories

  Eudora Welty (1995). “One Writer's Beginnings”, p.90, Harvard University Press

• 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 brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

  Eudora Welty

  Reading, Heart, Writing

  Eudora Welty (1962). “Three papers on fiction”

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

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Stories, Next

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

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Stories, Next

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

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Pleasure, My Friends

  Eudora Welty (2016). “Delta Wedding”, p.7, Head of Zeus

• 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.

  Eudora Welty

  Reading, Writing, Voice

• 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 page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Character, Cities

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

  Eudora Welty

  Writing, Thinking, Direct

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