After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.