Eudora Welty

"Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most."

"The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive."

"If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?"

"Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own…"

"Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?"

"I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."

"Human life is fiction's only theme."

"The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive …"