Quote

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

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
Wells
Might
Well
Trying
Aren
Reader
Writer
Forget

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
Wallace Stegner
Image
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
Image
There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
Wallace Stegner
Image
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
Image
You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
Image
No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
Image
If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
Wallace Stegner