Quote

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

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
Fiction
Answers
Clear
Everything
Great
Absolutely
Answer

More quotes by Eudora Welty

Image
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.
Eudora Welty
Image
People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel...but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.
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
Image
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.
Eudora Welty
Image
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
Eudora Welty
Image
What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
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
I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.
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
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
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
One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
Eudora Welty
Image
How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing.
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
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
Image
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
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
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
Image
Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
Image
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Eudora Welty