A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
Willa Cather

All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
Willa Cather

Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Willa Cather

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

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Willa Cather

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Willa Cather


Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Willa Cather

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Willa Cather

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Willa Cather

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Willa Cather

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa Cather

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather