# Quote — Eudora Welty, On Writing

> 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.

- Author: [Eudora Welty](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eudora-welty.md)
- Book: [On Writing](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eudora-welty/on-writing.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eudora_Welty#%22Must_the_Novelist_Crusade%3F%22) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/eudora-welty/on-writing/every-writer-like

## More from this book

> The story and its analyses are not mirror-opposites of each other. They are not reflections, either one. Criticism indeed is an art, as a story is, but only the story is to some degree a vision; there is no explanation outside fiction for what the writer is learning to do. ("Writing and Analyzing a Story")

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eudora-welty/on-writing/the-story-and.md)

> What can place not give? Theme. It can present theme, show it to the last detail — but place is forever illustrative: it is a picture of what man has done and imagined, it is his visible past, result. Human life is fiction’s only theme. ("Place in Fiction")

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eudora-welty/on-writing/what-can-place.md)

> Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion. ("Place in Fiction")

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/eudora-welty/on-writing/making-reality-real.md)