I just read a pictural biography of Willa Cather and I'd like to share.
Her thoughts on her craft: "Art is not thought or emotion, but expression, expression, always expression. To keep an idea living, intact, tinged with all its original feeling, its original mood, preserving in it all the ecstasy which attended its birth, to keep it so all the way from the brain to the hand and transfer it on paper a living thing with color, odor, sound, life all in it..."
And a sample of her writing from the novel Lucy Gayheart " In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, you must, if you walk abroad at all, at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say good-morning and go on."
And finally: " If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anythin enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material... He fades away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be born again."
1 comment:
I just read a pictural biography of Willa Cather and I'd like to share.
Her thoughts on her craft:
"Art is not thought or emotion, but expression, expression, always expression. To keep an idea living, intact, tinged with all its original feeling, its original mood, preserving in it all the ecstasy which attended its birth, to keep it so all the way from the brain to the hand and transfer it on paper a living thing with color, odor, sound, life all in it..."
And a sample of her writing from the novel Lucy Gayheart
" In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, you must, if you walk abroad at all, at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say good-morning and go on."
And finally:
" If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anythin enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material... He fades away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be born again."
Post a Comment