A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them;… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail.… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first .” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
