There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
Courage and fear were one thing too.
Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America.
Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.
Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.
I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.
In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
I have written a great many stories and I still don’t know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If we could learn to like ourselves, even a little, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all.
I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.
Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.
A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.