Quotes from Eudora Welty

How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing.

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.

I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

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.

Out of love you can speak with straight fury.

All serious daring starts from within.

Never think you've seen the last of anything.

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.

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.

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.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

Making reality real is art's responsibility.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

Children like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.

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.

The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again

All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.

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.