Eudora Welty Quotes

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that human beings wrote books. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance for me... I just didn't think it was something that people did.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

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.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

The writers of books are companions in one's life and, as such, are often more interesting than other companions.

The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.

When I was about eight, I realised the person whose name was on the book got money for it, and it seemed almost too good to be true that you could get paid for making things up.

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 should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.