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Hard writing makes easy reading.

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
Easy
Makes
Hard
Writing
Reading

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
Wallace Stegner
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
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We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
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National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
Wallace Stegner
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
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Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.
Wallace Stegner
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Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
Wallace Stegner
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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
Wallace Stegner
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It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
Wallace Stegner
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Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.
Wallace Stegner
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One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
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[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner