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Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Eudora Welty

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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
Memories
Keepers
Born
Diary
Great
Diaries
Good
Tale
Love
Letter
Retainers
Tales
Southerners
Letters
Southerner
Memory
Talkers

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
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Beware of a man with manners.
Eudora Welty
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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
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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
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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
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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
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Eudora Welty
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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.
Eudora Welty
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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
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty
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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
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Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Eudora Welty
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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
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A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Eudora Welty
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
Eudora Welty
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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
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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
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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
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Eudora Welty
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Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
Eudora Welty