Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Written
Age
Acquired
Writing
Fifteen
Basic
Material
Materials
Works
Writer
More quotes by Willa Cather
There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather
Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.
Willa Cather
It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
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
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
Willa Cather
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather
I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
Willa Cather
Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
Willa Cather
Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
Willa Cather
Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
Willa Cather
That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
Willa Cather
Success is never so interesting as struggle
Willa Cather
From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
Willa Cather
All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
Willa Cather
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
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
