176 Quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

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.

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

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

Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

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.

Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don't be so afraid of giving yourself away, either, for if yo write, you must. And if you can't face that, better not write.

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.

Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.