Willa Cather Quotes

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

It made me alive to the fact that the most important thing sometimes is what isn't said - to prepare for moments of revelation that can be read entirely on actors' faces without dialogue.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

When you go to a movie, it's about what's not being said. I tried to bring that to Greg Sumner. It was always about what's not being said.

Where more is meant than meets the ear.

As much as movies are about the words that you're saying, they're also about what's not said, the silent moments.

I'm obsessed with subtexts. I love that we often don't say what we feel. That gap between the two. I like it when actors reveal a lot without having to say it.

I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.

Sometimes with certain writing, you feel like you've got to be literal, hit it hard on the nose, just to get the point across. Good writing is more subversive I think - or good scenes. They are about one thing on the page but you can make it about something completely different.

One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

I write because it's a way of presenting something without having to be there.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that is creative, passionate and personal. Art is the unique work of a human being created to touch another. Art is created to have an impact, to change someone else.

Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.

The artist must say it without saying it.

All good writing leaves something unexpressed.