Wallace Stegner Writing Quotations

Hard writing makes easy reading.

We write to make sense of it all.

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

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

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.

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

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

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