I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.
You think of the book you’d most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
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.
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.
I guess there are never enough books.
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.
A book is like a man – clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.
They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of meaning which stretches not only forward in the book but stems from before in the book.
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.
A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.
For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody – to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.
Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can’t take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.
I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.