Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eudora Welty
Age: 102 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 13
Died: 2011
Died: July 23
Author
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Photographer
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Eudora Alice Welty
Upon
Happenings
Experience
Effect
Stories
Effects
Writing
Cause
Way
Writer
Life
Novel
Stumbling
Causes
Sequence
Story
Discovering

More quotes by Eudora Welty

Image
Daydreaming had started me on the way but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
One place understood helps us understand all places better
Eudora Welty
Image
Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
Eudora Welty
Image
Don't give anybody up. He stroked her. Or leave anybody out. Me and you both left her out today, and I'm ashamed for us. There just wasn't room in today for it ... He said, There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help.
Eudora Welty
Image
Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon. That reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation.
Eudora Welty
Image
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.
Eudora Welty
Image
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.
Eudora Welty
Image
Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.
Eudora Welty
Image
If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
Image
My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Eudora Welty
Image
The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Eudora Welty
Image
Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.
Eudora Welty
Image
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
Image
Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.
Eudora Welty
Image
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