Willa Cather
Willa Cather
Willa Sibert Catherwas an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 December 1873
CountryUnited States of America
book reading writing
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
art spring writing
Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.
writing accomplishment novelists
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.
new-york writing creative
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
writing years perfect
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.
writing office world
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.
book writing kind
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
real book writing
It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.
writing age fifteen
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
writing caring fighting
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.
art writing breakfast-food
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
lying character writing
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.
country fiercely five happened human notes repeating singing themselves thousands three
Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years
earth elsewhere floor roof sky
Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world, but here the earth is the floor of the sky.