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

Part II, Ch. 3
The Song of the Lark (1915)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer." by Willa Cather?
Willa Cather photo
Willa Cather 99
American writer and novelist 1873–1947

Related quotes

Camille Paglia photo

“The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 29

Benito Mussolini photo

“Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Popolo d'Italia (14 July 1920) "The Artificer and the Material," quoted in Mussolini in the Making (1938) by Gaudens Megaro, p. 326
1920s

Tracy Chevalier photo

“I have huge respect for short stories—I just find them much harder to get right than a novel. A novel is a lot baggier and it gives you more leeway to go on for too long or to make mistakes. Whereas in a short story, every sentence, every word, matters—and that’s very hard. I think it’s easier to write too much than it is to write exactly the right thing.”

Tracy Chevalier (1962) American writer

On how she compares short story writing to novel writing in “An Interview with Tracy Chevalier” https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-tracy-chevalier/ in Fiction Writers Review (2019 Sep 23)

Paul Gauguin photo

“At the age of ten, twenty, a hundred, very young, a little older, and very old, an artist is always an artist. Isn't he better at some times, some moments, than at others? Never impeccable, since he is a living, human being?”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 219: quote from 1903

Alexander Graham Bell photo

“A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with — a man is what he makes of himself.”

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) scientist and inventor known for his work on the telephone

Bell Telephone Talk (1901)

Christian Morgenstern photo
E.E. Cummings photo

“Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Re Ezra Pound (p. 69)
i : six nonlectures (1953)
Context: Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself.
An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself — whoever himself may be — is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.

Fortunato Depero photo

Related topics