Quote

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.

Wallace Stegner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Mind
Memory
Handler
Things
Tools
Vendors
Life
Writer
Particulars
Fiction
Sensuous
Memories
Primarily
Serious
Pictures
Sense
Profession
Vendor
Happens
Valuable
Perceiver

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
Image
To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The life we all live is amateurish and accidental it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
Wallace Stegner
Image
When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
Wallace Stegner
Image
This early piece of the morning is mine.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.
Wallace Stegner
Image
[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
Image
It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
Image
You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.
Wallace Stegner
Image
If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
Wallace Stegner
Image
How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.
Wallace Stegner
Image
In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
Wallace Stegner
Image
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
Image
wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner