"Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...












Hard writing makes easy reading.

More Wallace Stegner quotes
"Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
"That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the ...
"I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, ...
"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...
"The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is ...
"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...