Eudora Welty Quotes

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Part of a writer's job is just spacing out, looking into the air and imagining things.

Every day I fantasise about situations and little themes I see in front of me that would make a good beginning of a story. But one has to be disciplined and just sit down and do it.

A story in your head isn't a story. It's just a daydream until you actually write it down. So write it down.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

There is no story unless you've written it.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.