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It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.

Wallace Stegner

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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Impossible
Almost
Mormons
Call
Mormon
Society
Peculiar
Write
Explanation
Reason
Institutions
Writing
Constant
Fiction

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Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
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Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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We write to make sense of it all.
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No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
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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.
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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.
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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.
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