John Steinbeck
I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.Collection: Hate
This is beyond understanding." said the king. "You are the wisest man alive. You know what is preparing. Why do you not make a plan to save yourself?" And Merlin said quietly, "Because I am wise. In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.Collection: Wise
A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.Collection: Book
There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.Collection: Men
I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.Collection: People
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.Collection: Hate
One can't be happy as I have been for very long. There's a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate.Collection: Hate
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.Collection: Writing
He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.Collection: Inspirational
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.Collection: Choices
The first grave. Now we're getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that's home, Tom. Those are the things that hold a man down.Collection: Children
He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man.Collection: Men
Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.Collection: Brother
It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.Collection: Insane
Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.Collection: Men
We don't take a trip. A trip takes us.Collection: Travel
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.Collection: Book
The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.Collection: Loss
Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.Collection: Home
There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.Collection: Medicine
Texas is not a state - it's a state of mind.Collection: Texas
You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.Collection: Weed
But Doc had one mental habit he could not get over. When anyone asked a question, Doc thought he wanted to know the answer.Collection: Answers
Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.Collection: Lazy
A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.Collection: Dog
Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.Collection: Guy
Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.Collection: Real
A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.Collection: Children
I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.Collection: Looks
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.Collection: Writing
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.Collection: Book
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.Collection: Travel
Well, I remember this girl. I am not whole without her. I am not alive without her. When she was with me I was more alive than I have ever been, and not only when she was pleasant either. Even when we were fighting I was whole.Collection: Girl
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.Collection: Reading
The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.Collection: Men
Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.Collection: Prayer
I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.Collection: Book
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.Collection: Writing
Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.Collection: Nice
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.Collection: Heart
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.Collection: Stories
My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.Collection: Journey
They's times when how you feel got to be kep' to yourself.Collection: How You Feel
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.Collection: Writing
Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.Collection: Originality
There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.Collection: Wrath
Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.Collection: Hate
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.Collection: Real
And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.Collection: People