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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.

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
Story
Stories
Daydreaming
Writing
Grip
Way
Shook
Awake
Truly
Took
Started

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
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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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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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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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.
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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The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
Eudora Welty
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
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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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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The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.
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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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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Plots are ... what the writer sees with.
Eudora Welty
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Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
Eudora Welty
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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
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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.
Eudora Welty
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Write about what you don't know about what you know.
Eudora Welty
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Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
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