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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the deeply personal and creative nature of storytelling.
Katherine Anne Porter's quote illustrates how storytelling is an intrinsic process, akin to a spider spinning its web. It reflects the passion and care an author invests in their narrative, treating it as a cherished creation, much like a parent loves their child. This suggests that stories are not just fabricated tales but extensions of the storyteller's own experiences and emotions.
In practice
This quote could be shared at a writing workshop to inspire aspiring authors.
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.
Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.
The highest art form of all is a human being in control of himself and his airplane in flight, urging the spirit of a machine to match his own.
An artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.
I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.
The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency---half tiger,half poet.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
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