I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world's millions, I am also born more obligated.
Wallace StegnerThe meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace StegnerCreation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace StegnerI wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.
Wallace StegnerGrub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if heโs far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he canโt afford self-doubt and he canโt let other peopleโs opinions, even a fatherโs, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner