Wallace Stegner Writing Quotations

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

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.

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

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.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

We write to make sense of it all.

Hard writing makes easy reading.