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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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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
Acute
Listened
Wrote
Listening
Stories
Long
Something

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty
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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
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
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
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I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
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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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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Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
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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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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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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My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
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.
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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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
Eudora Welty
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Time is anonymous when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
Eudora Welty
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One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.
Eudora Welty
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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Eudora Welty
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Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
Eudora Welty