Quotes from Katherine Anne Porter

From Old Mortality ] ...religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.

Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

You waste life when you waste good food.

In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

I'm not afraid of life and I'm not afraid of death: Dying's the bore.

Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.

Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather.

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn't trouble to write anything.

Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.

Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.

Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.

Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don't be so afraid of giving yourself away, either, for if yo write, you must. And if you can't face that, better not write.

I love to praise what I love, and I won't for a minute believe that love is blind -- indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

words can never get at the truth.