10 quotes
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
On Writing (2002)
All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment.
One Writer's Beginnings (1984)
If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?
[he] said to her, "You will find that men who are generous the way he is generous have needs to match."
The Robber Bridegroom (1942)
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.
On Writing (2002)
She has spent her life trying to escape from the parlor-like jaws of self-consciousness. ("Old Mr. Marblehall")
A Curtain Green and Other Stories (1941)
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?
The Optimist's Daughter (1972)
It's by living on, it seems me now, that the way of real honesty lies. The realest possible honesty is come by, attained, earned if you like, by continuing. I'd put up these essays in evidence. Honesty is of human birth: it must breathe, and keep restoring itself.
What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.
her Preface to The Collected Stories (1980)
Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams and in Natchez it was the bitterest winter of them all. (beginning of "First Love ")
The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943)