Wallace Stegner Quotes

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

I look at the great poets of the Soviet Union, like Anna Akhmatova, who endured far worse then anything we've seen or hopefully that we will ever see. If they could keep writing and keep a voice alive, keep people hopeful through their poetry, then I would be ashamed to stop and to give in. It would be really self-indulgent, unacceptable, and inexcusable to walk away from it.

Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.

You really write the books you want to write. You can't take into consideration anything that anybody has said about you in the past, or what they'll say about you in the future.

The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.

My feeling is that I think writers in general tend to be self-conscious and it takes a bit of a leap of faith or just not giving a sh-t to write something you know people are going to criticize.

I sometimes think that I can't do the bigger thing that [Zadie Smith] do so beautifully, as in Swing Time, with so much world in it and so much rapturous paint thrown around. I don't think it would be possible to write a book on that scale with as much OCD as I have.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.

It's so easy to get caught up in your own self-doubt when you're writing. It can be so easy to tell yourself, "Who am I kidding?"

Each book gets harder, each book gets harder and harder. I always feel like crying when I have to write.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it’s really a false start is when you start … it’s hard to put into words.

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.

There's still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I'm not trying to say I'm not happy with the novels I've written in the past. But it always feels to me like there's another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.

I've always operated with a great deal of self-doubt. Every time I start a new book it's like, well, this one will destroy the career and I have to overcome that feeling especially in the first hundred pages of the book.

Every song that I start to write, I wonder if I'll be able to write it.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.