One might say that every fine story must leave in…

One might say that every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden… It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his “imagination” upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind “teased” by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.

Sourced, Not Under Forty (1936)

Miss Jewett

Other Willa Cather Quotes

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. - View Quote Details on Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing…
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. - View Quote Details on The dead might as well try to speak to the…
Where there is great love there are always miracles. - View Quote Details on Where there is great love there are always miracles.
Of course it [football] is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi. - View Quote Details on Of course it [football] is brutal. So is Homer brutal,…
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. - View Quote Details on Most of the basic material a writer works with is…
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. - View Quote Details on There are only two or three human stories, and they…
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. - View Quote Details on Religion and art spring from the same root and are…
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody. - View Quote Details on Men are all right for friends, but as soon as…
The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world. - View Quote Details on The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated…
If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations. - View Quote Details on If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but…