Walker Percy Quotes

You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

The last few years I've had to force myself to go out and be more involved the world because I can get a bit more cerebral and escape into characters and the world of characters. But now I guess I escape into stories about 'Wilfred.'

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

To me, fiction is the single best way there is - to me, it's the most profound way - of dealing with questions that have no answers.

We don't know our own story.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

Poetry surprises us with what we already know.

You must remember how to dream what you already know.

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

One of the things [fiction] does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

You know more than you know.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

All that you can imagine you already know.

You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

Don't 'write what you know.' Make up something new!

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.