Quote

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

Willa Cather

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Things
Perfect
Time
Force
Keep
Better
Writing
Guard
Work
Mature
Much
Quiet
Years
Five

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
Willa Cather
Image
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
Willa Cather
Image
Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather
Image
Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
Willa Cather
Image
Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Willa Cather
Image
In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.
Willa Cather
Image
Too much information is rather deadening.
Willa Cather
Image
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
Image
The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
Willa Cather
Image
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Willa Cather
Image
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
Willa Cather
Image
It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
Willa Cather
Image
Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather
Image
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
Image
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
Willa Cather
Image
Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Willa Cather
Image
Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
Willa Cather
Image
To fulfil the dreams of one's youth that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
Willa Cather
Image
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather
Image
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather