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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
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Journalist
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Willa Sibert Cather
Age
Acquired
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Fifteen
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Written
More quotes by Willa Cather
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Willa Cather
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
Willa Cather
Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
Willa Cather
Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
Willa Cather
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Willa Cather
Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
Willa Cather
The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Willa Cather
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
Willa Cather
I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
Willa Cather
Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
Willa Cather
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Willa Cather
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather
People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
Willa Cather
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather
A burnt dog dreads the fire.
Willa Cather
Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa Cather
Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
Willa Cather
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
Willa Cather
It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
Willa Cather