Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

On the Art of Fiction" ~ Originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920) - Willa Cather on Writing (1949)