Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit… — 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
I imagine you will always be pinched for money, for time, for a place to work. But I think you will do… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“...you must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“I’m not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m… — 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
“Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters,… — 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
A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed… — 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
“and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at… — 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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. — 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 things. His… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image