Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

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

I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.

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.

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

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.

It is such a relief to be told the truth.

I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have religious training. And I suppose you don’t say, “I’m going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal, but of course it does.

There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.

A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself — or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind. You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

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

Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.