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
Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
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.
Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.
To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.
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.