Wright Morris Quotes

#1. I prefer a taken to a made photograph.

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

#4. 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.

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

#9. 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.

Wright Morris

#10. 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.

Wright Morris

#11. 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?

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

#14. 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.

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

#16. Everyone in California is from somewhere else.

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

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

Wright Morris

#21. 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

Wright Morris