All Time Famous Wright Morris Quotes

Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.

Wright Morris Quotes

1. “In the blur of the photograph, time leaves its gleaming, snail-like track.”
— Wright Morris

2. “When writing is good, everything is symbolic, but symbolic writing is seldom good.”
— Wright Morris

3. “The photograph, after all, is just a photograph. Words will determine its meaning and status.”
— Wright Morris

4. “The past is useless. That explains why it is past.”
— Wright Morris

5. “We’re in the world of communications more and more, tough we’re in communication less and less.”
— Wright Morris

6. “Cats don’t belong to people. They belong to places.”
— Wright Morris

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “We make to ourselves pictures of facts. The picture is a model of reality.”
— Wright Morris

14. “Everyone in California is from somewhere else.”
— Wright Morris

15. “The vast number of photographers, feeding on anything visible, overgraze the landscape the way cattle overgraze their pasture.”
— Wright Morris

16. “Writes have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind’s anchorage, the soul’s Great Good Place.”
— Wright Morris

17. “I prefer a taken to a made photograph.”
— Wright Morris

18. “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

19. “They all liked California, but they thought the people were cold.”
— Wright Morris

20. “Pretty good-looking women, in the main, thanks to the California sun.”
— Wright Morris