Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness. Willa Cather
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper – whether little or great, it belongs to Literature. 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
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. Willa Cather
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works. Willa Cather
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke. Willa Cather
The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate. Willa Cather