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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Willa Cather

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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Well
Within
Range
Presented
Writing
Lying
Notes
Reporters
Artist
Lies
Limitations
Write
View
Deepest
Character
Writer
Note
Best
Talent
Limitation
Wells
Views
Equally
Sympathies
Everything
Creative
Define
Reporter

More quotes by Willa Cather

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It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
Willa Cather
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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
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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
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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
Willa Cather
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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Willa Cather
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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
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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
Willa Cather
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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
Willa Cather
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
Willa Cather
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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
Willa Cather
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Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
Willa Cather
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
Willa Cather
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
Willa Cather
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The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
Willa Cather
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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
Willa Cather
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
Willa Cather
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
Willa Cather
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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
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather