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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

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
Surprised
Havens
Haven
Written

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
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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
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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
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Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp - peace, that's what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.
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I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
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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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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Greater than scene is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
Eudora Welty
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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
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One place understood helps us understand all places better
Eudora Welty
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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Eudora Welty
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
Eudora Welty
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There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
Eudora Welty
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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
Eudora Welty
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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Eudora Welty
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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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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
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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Eudora Welty