Wallace Stegner Quotes

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

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination must make a leap. There are so many horizons, geological and human, where the evidence is missing or incomplete.

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

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do.

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.