When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street… — 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
