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To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

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
Write
Writing
Powers
Honestly
Least

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
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To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.
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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Through travel I first became aware of the outside world it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.
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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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
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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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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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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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A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
Eudora Welty
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
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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She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
Eudora Welty
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Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.
Eudora Welty
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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
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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
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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No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
Eudora Welty
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Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
Eudora Welty