4 Willa Cather Quotes on Craft

Willa Cather quotes on craft

24. Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

30. Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

38. Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgics,' where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.'

95. 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.