Wallace Stegner - Writer Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

View all Wallace Stegner Quotes

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

Wallace Stegner

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

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

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

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

Wallace Stegner

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

Wallace Stegner

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

Wallace Stegner