Quote

We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.

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
Write
Find
Writing

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
Image
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Wallace Stegner
Image
There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
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
American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
Image
Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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
We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
Wallace Stegner
Image
In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there its roar shook both the earth and me.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
Wallace Stegner