# Quote — Eudora Welty, On Writing

> How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing. ("Place in fiction")

- 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#On_Writing_(2002)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/eudora-welty/on-writing/how-can-you

## 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)