Don't want to do a thing, Ran, do we, from now and on till evermore.

— Eudora Welty

Every since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It wasn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. Furthermore, it is to me the voice of the poem or the story itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

— Eudora Welty

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the inducibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure.

— Eudora Welty

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.

— Eudora Welty

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

— Eudora Welty

Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

— Eudora Welty

Human life is fiction's only theme.

— Eudora Welty

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.

— Eudora Welty

I can't think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother Edward came along we both became comics, making each other laugh.

— Eudora Welty

I didn't hit other people or hit purposefully, I just hit. Some object would be at fault. My anger was at myself, every time, all vanity. As an adolescent I was a slammer of drawers and a packer of suitcases. I was responsible for scenes. Control came imperfectly to all of us: we reached it at different times of life, frustrated, shot into indignation, by different things - some that are grown out of, and others not. Of all my strong emotions, anger is the one least responsible for any of my work. I don't write out of anger. For one thing, simply as a fiction writer, I am minus an adversary - except, of course, that of time - and for another thing, the act of writing in itself brings me happiness.

— Eudora Welty