Quotes
<< Prev Next >>
When you're a child you're the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They're only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.
East of Eden
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.
The Winter of Our Discontent
The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
East of Eden
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.
East of Eden
Of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
East of Eden
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.
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.
The Winter of Our Discontent
It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.
For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.
The Pearl
Search
On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays
Essays