There’s an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.
There’s something desirable about anything you’re used to as opposed to something you’re not.
Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt.
Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.
Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.
Not only do the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.
Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.
Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
Like most modern people, I don’t believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.
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.
I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.
No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe.
If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.
It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leporous.
You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
It isn’t like the rest of the country – it is like a nation itself – more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.