Quotessence
Home / Authors / Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner Quotes

Historian

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsPeopleWritingThinkingKnowsWantWildernessNeedsWayWestAirCharacterGreenHas BeensHomeLeftLifeLittlesMightPast

Famous Wallace Stegner Quotes

“I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.”

WritingPastFutureObsession
Book:Angle of Repose
Create image

“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 is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.”

WritingIdeasCreative ProcessSubject MatterGeneralizations
Book:On Teaching and Writing Fiction
Create image

“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.”

IfsThinkingShouldWritingFirstsLongHas BeensDoneSchoolYoungChildhoodCollegePaperAmbitionPreparationEnteringDiscouragedPrintedBe EncouragedYoung WritersApprenticeship
Author:Wallace Stegner
Create image