Wright Morris Quotes

The imagination made us human, but being human, becoming more human, is a greater burden than we imagined. We have no choice but to imagine ourselves more human than we are.

We're in the world of communications more and more, tough we're in communication less and less.

After many months of writing, it occured to me that it might be possible to photograph, in the flesh, what I was attempting to capture in words. I bought a Rolleiflex camera and began to take pictures of objects or structures that were used and abused by human hands

I prefer a taken to a made photograph.

However much [photographs] may lie, they do so with the raw materials of truth.

There's little to see, but things leave an impression. It's a matter of time and repetition. As something old wears thin or out, something new wears in. The handle on the pump, the crank on the churn, the dipper floating in the bucket, the latch on the screen, the door on the privy, the fender on the stove, the knees of the pants and the seat of the chair, the handle of the brush and the lid to the pot exist in time but outside taste; they wear in more than they wear out. It can't be helped. It's neither good nor bad. It's the nature of life.

The vast number of photographers, feeding on anything visible, overgraze the landscape the way cattle overgraze their pasture.

The man who comes to writing late, but is in essence a writer, may sometimes gain as much as he has lost: his experience of life has given him a subject, he is spared the youthful writer's self-torment and soul-searching.

Writes have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind's anchorage, the soul's Great Good Place.

[We] make images to see clearly: then we see clearly what we have made.

When writing is good, everything is symbolic, but symbolic writing is seldom good.

Writing has made me rich-not in money but in a couple hundred characters out there, whose pursuits and anguish and triumphs I've shared. I am unspeakably grateful at the life I have come to lead.

Images proliferate. Am I wrong in being reminded of printing money in a period of wild inflation? Do we know what we are doing? Are we able to evaluate what we have done?

In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track.

The man who walks alone is soon trailed by the F.B.I.

Everyone in California is from somewhere else.

The camera eye is the one in the middle of our forehead, combining how we see with what there is to be seen.

The past is useless. That explains why it is past.

The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.

As the style of Faulkner grew out of his rage--out of the impotence of his rage--the style of Hemingway grew out of the depth andnuance of his disenchantment.

Cats don't belong to people. They belong to places.

We make to ourselves pictures of facts. The picture is a model of reality