Eudora Welty Stories Quotations

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.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.

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.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories.

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.