Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Weltywas an American short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards including the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 April 1909
CityJackson, MS
CountryUnited States of America
I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.
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.
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.
All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.
Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.
Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.
[William Eggleston] sets forth what makes up our ordinary world. What is there, however strange, can be accepted without question; familiarity will be what overwhelms us.
What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.
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.