Willa Cather Quotes

'Piku' was driven by subtleties. Most films come with the padding of the sound, the visual, the drama.

The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

I like poems that are complex.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I love writing picture books and story books because of the exciting, visual life that artists and illustrators give to them. And most of all, I love writing novels because of the inner, emotional journeys that they take me on. Hopefully, the reader comes with me!

The words of the songs speak for themselves.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

I write to music, and Nina Simone is always on my playlist to write to. I mean, she's inspiring. She's truthful and real and raw.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

Those emotions that are really strong, the ones that inspire a song, you can hold onto that. You can let it marinate for years and keep writing about it even better than you did then.

When I write songs, I write from a lot of perspectives.

When you're trying to create imagery, you're trying to create a feeling or a mood.

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

We write poems / as leaves give oxygen - / so we can breathe.

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.

You look at somebody's work as an actor and you can see their emotional life being fed into it and you can kind of feel them through it.

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression. I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama. There's a lot of bullshit drama that leaves you totally cold. And there's a lot of wasted comedy time too. But when you get something honest, it doesn't matter what label you give it.