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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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I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
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Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
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I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.
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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.
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One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
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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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
Eudora Welty
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Eudora Welty
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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
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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
Eudora Welty
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Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
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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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
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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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The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
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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it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there the point is to have a destination.
Eudora Welty
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No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
Eudora Welty
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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