Wallace Stegner

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living…

— Wallace Stegner

“The Cypress Hills massacre,...one of the final outrages of the literally lawless West...came...along that practical and symbolic divide, between the Canadian system…

— Wallace Stegner

it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

— Wallace Stegner

“Largeness is a lifelong matter,” he wrote. “. . . You grow because you are not content not to. You are like…

— Wallace Stegner

We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was…

— Wallace Stegner

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea…

— Wallace Stegner

“He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden…

— Wallace Stegner

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences

— Wallace Stegner

No place is a place until it has found its poet.

— Wallace Stegner

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

— Wallace Stegner

“He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.”

— Wallace Stegner

“He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself…

— Wallace Stegner

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar…

— Wallace Stegner

“I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light…

— Wallace Stegner

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.

— Wallace Stegner

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

— Wallace Stegner

“Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the…

— Wallace Stegner

“Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.”

— Wallace Stegner

“Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the…

— Wallace Stegner

Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of…

— Wallace Stegner

“Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those…

— Wallace Stegner

You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.

— Wallace Stegner

“Anyone pretending to be a guide through wild and fabulous territory should know the territory. I wish I knew it better than…

— Wallace Stegner

“And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a…

— Wallace Stegner

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By…

— Wallace Stegner