“Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself… — 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
