Writers on Themselves (1986)
“To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.”
"Miss Jewett"; originally published as the Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925)
Not Under Forty (1936)
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Willa Cather 99
American writer and novelist 1873–1947Related quotes
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 46.
Foreword
The Still Centre (1939)
Context: A poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience.
Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something felt is true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience.
Martin Light in The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis (1975)
Kenneth Sisam (ed.) Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose ([1921] 1955) p. 3.
Criticism
Source: Conversations with Judith Cladel (1939–1944), p. 407
Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 195
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)