Katherine Anne Porter

A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.

Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.

You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.

Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.

Now and again thousands of memories _x000D_ converge, harmonize, _x000D_ arrange themselves around a central idea _x000D_ in a coherent form, _x000D_ and I write a story.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.

Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

With the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

There are so many things that we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.

Defeat in this world is no disgrace and that is what they cannot understand. If you really fought well and fought for the right thing.

One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.

Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.