Wallace Stegner - Life Quotes

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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.

Wallace Stegner

It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.

Wallace Stegner

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

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

Wallace Stegner

It doesn't seem to me that life conforms to systems. Only systems conform to systems.

Wallace Stegner

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

Wallace Stegner

Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life.

Wallace Stegner