Quote

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.

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
Would
Cities
Bus
Story
Apply
Stories
Wherever
Part
Page
Seems
Pages
Character
Exactly
Everything
Meet
Writing
City
Overhear

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Time is anonymous when we give it a face, it's the same face the world over.
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Beware of a man with manners.
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Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
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The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again
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Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.
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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.
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
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The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new but that is enough.
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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.
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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.
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Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Location pertains to feelings - feelings are bound up in place.
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Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.
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One place understood helps us understand all places better
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