Quote

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

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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
Firsts
Cloud
First
Steady
Must
Clouds
Writing
Putting
Good
Seeing
Allowable
Lasts
Vagueness
Purpose
Lucidity
Last
Blur

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I get a moral satisfaction out of putting things together.
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Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery... brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.
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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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The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
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I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.
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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
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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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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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Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
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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.
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A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
Eudora Welty
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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty