John Steinbeck

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.

And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men.

... You can't start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relived when they get to democracy that they hang on to it.

And don't worry about losing. If I is right, it happens - the main thing is not to hurry.Nothing good gets away.

He hated old women. They frightened him. There was a smell about them that gave him the willies. They were fierce and they had no price. They never gave a damn about making a scene. They got what they wanted. Louie's grandmother had been a tyrant. She had got whatever she wanted by being fierce.

If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them and pretty soon you have a dozen.

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 improve.

The house was clean, scrubbed and immaculate, curtains washed, windows polished, but all as a man does it - the ironed curtains did not hang quite straight and there were streaks on the windows and a square showed on the table when a book was moved.