All Quotes

"He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from."

"I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."

"We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat."

"Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself."

"Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening covey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner."

"When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing."

"For a while I was a vicious fighter but it wasn't to win. It was to get it over and get the hell out of there. And I never would have done it at all if other people hadn't put me in the ring. The only private fights I ever had were those I couldn't get away from."

"I have never even wondered about the comparative standing of writers. I don't understand that. Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late."

"I can remember the horror which came over my parents when they became convinced that it was so with me [that I wanted to be a writer]—and properly so. What you have and they had to look forward to is life made intolerable by a mean, cantankerous, opinionated, moody, quarrelsome, unreasonable, nervous, flighty, irresponsible son. You will get no loyalty, little consideration and desperately little attention from him. In fact you will want to kill him. I'm sure my father and mother often must have considered poisoning me."

"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through — not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible."

"I like a chapter to have design of tone, as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should be almost able to stand alone. If this is done then the breaks we call chapters are not arbitrary but rather articulations which allow the free movement of the story."

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

"I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn't read the proletarian crap that came out in the '30s; again you had sentimentalism — the poor oppressed workers."

"I am glad that I can use the oldest story in the world to be the design of the newest story for me. The lack of change in the world is the thing which astonishes me. [...] And now I had set down in my own hand the 16 verses of Cain and Abel and the story changes with flashing lights when you write it down. And I think I have a title at last, a beautiful title, EAST OF EDEN. And read the 16th verse to find it. And the Salinas Valley is surely East Of Eden. [...] And [...] as I went into the story more deeply I began to realize that without this story — or rather a sense of it — psychiatrists would have nothing to do. In other words this one story is the basis of all human neurosis — and if you take the fall along with it, you have the total of the psychic troubles which can happen to a human."

"I believe that the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would milleniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth."

"... the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

"I have noticed so many of the reviews of my work show a fear and hatred of ideas and speculations. It seems to be true that people can only take parables fully clothed with flesh. Any attempt to correlate in terms of thought is frightening. And if that is so, East of Eden is going to take a bad beating because it is full of such things."

"A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun."

"Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand."

"In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins."

"This is the law. The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplementary."

"If lowborn men could stand up to those born to rule, religion, government, the whole world would fall to pieces." "So it would," she said. "So it will." "I don't believe you," Ewain said. "But for the sake of the discussion, what then, my lady?" "Why then — then the pieces would have to be put together again." "By such as these—?" "Who else? Who indeed else?"

"One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feeling and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man — if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man — there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible."

"An artist should be open on all sides to every kind of light and darkness."

"Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much."

"Now back to Malory.[…] As I go along, I am constantly jiggled by the arrant nonsense of a great deal of the material. A great deal of it makes no sense at all. Two thirds of it is the vain dreaming of children talking in the dark. And then when you are about to throw it out in disgust, you remember the Congressional Record or the Sacco and Vanzetti case or 'preventive war' or our national political platforms, or racial problems that can't be settled reasonably or domestic relations, or beatniks, and it is borne in on you that the world operates on nonsense — that it is a large part of the pattern and that knight errantry is no more crazy than our present-day group thinking, and activity. That is the way humans are. If you inspected them and their activities in the glass of reason, you would drown the whole lot."

"I can tell you one thing I have finally faced through — the Arthurian cycle and practically all lasting and deep-seated folklore is a mixture of profundity and childish nonsense. If you keep the profundity and throw out the nonsense, some essence is lost. These are dream stories, fixed and universal dreams, and they have the inconsistency of dreams."

"Most people live in a half-dream all their lives and call it reality."

"[On writing:] It is properly called the lonesomest profession in the world."

"Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play."

"Time is the only critic without ambition."

"I have owed you this letter for a very long time — but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool."

"Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath and the subsequent John Ford movie promulgated a populist mythology about depression-era migrants to California who were dubbed "Okies," no matter what southwestern or midwestern state they hailed from. But most Californians regarded Okies as dirty, shifty, lazy, violent, and ignorant."

"There was one New Deal agency that proved helpful to us in the fields, and that was the Farm Security Administration. The FSA administered a system of migrant labor camps in California. When I read about the Joads arriving at the temporary safe haven of the "government camp" in The Grapes of Wrath, I knew exactly what they felt like."

"I read Cannery Row very carefully. I wanted to see how he did some things. At the end of Cannery Row there is a party and somebody recites a poem and it doesn't stop the dramatic action. I studied how he did that because I wanted to quote some songs and poems without stopping the drama."

"Steinbeck is extremely angry about the fact that the common man who is striving very hard, who wants so very little, is not even able to attain that little if it backs up against the interests of the banks and of the big landowners. You know, and that’s what The Grapes of Wrath, I think, is basically about, is about watching these people try to simply live who asking for little. They are not angry people. They are not revolutionaries. They are not sophisticated. They they simply want to farm a tenant farmers. They simply want to go out but their butts every day and get a small return and then pass that on to their children. And even that under certain circumstances is asking too much if you’re going to inopportune the banking interest. And that’s what made Steinbeck so furious...what he’s saying is that people it’s just not fair. That’s what he’s saying...he believes it is at this point that even people like the Joads can be moved to anger at the just at just the epitome of the unfairness of it all."

"When one thinks of California agriculture during the Depression, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath generally comes to mind. Steinbeck did not exaggerate. White and African American Dust Bowl migrants alongside Mexicanos and Filipinos endured great hardships."

"You can't avoid dealing with moral matters, because that's what life is about. But I think it is wrong when somebody like Steinbeck crusades in his fiction. That's why Steinbeck bores me so. The real crusader doesn't need to crusade; he writes about human beings in the sense Chekhov did. He tries to see a human being whole with all his wrong-headedness and all his right-headedness. To blind yourself to one thing for the sake of your prejudice is limiting. I think it is a mistake. There's so much room in the world for crusading, but it is for the editorial writer, the speech-maker, the politician, and the man in public life to do, not for the writer of fiction."

"But only love can break your heart Try to be sure right from the start Yes only love can break your heart What if your world should fall apart?"

"Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain With the barkers and the colored balloons, You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain Though you're thinking that You're leaving there too soon, You're leaving there too soon."

"Did you see them in the river? They were there to wave to you. Could you tell that the empty quiver, Brown skinned Indian on the banks That were crowded and narrow, Held a broken arrow?"

"There you stood on the edge of your feather Expecting to fly. While I laughed, I wondered whether I could wave goodbye Knowin' that you'd gone."

"I gave to you, now, you give to me I'd like to know what you learned. The sky is blue and so is the sea What is the color, when black is burned?"

"There is a town in north Ontario, With dream comfort memory to spare, And in my mind I still need a place to go, All my changes were there."

"Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drummin'. Four dead in Ohio."

"If you guarantee the postage, I'll mail you back the key."

"I've been looking for a woman to save my life Not to beg or to borrow A woman with the feeling of losing once or twice."

"A dreamer of pictures I run in the night. You see us together, Chasing the moonlight, My cinnamon girl."

"You take my hand, I'll take your hand Together we may get away This much madness is too much sorrow It's impossible to make it today."

"Look at Mother Nature on the run In the nineteen seventies."