There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the…

“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

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

— Wallace Stegner

“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

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

— Wallace Stegner

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

“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should…

— Wallace Stegner

Hard writing makes easy reading.

— Wallace Stegner

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

— Wallace Stegner

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

— Wallace Stegner

“His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.”

— Wallace Stegner

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

“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

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

“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

“[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