I have thought the difference might be that my Mary knows she will live forever, that she will step from the living into another life as easily as she slips from sleep to wakefulness. She knows this w...
Ma raised her eyes to the girl's face. Ma's eyes were patient, but the lines of strain were on her forehead. Ma fanned and fanned the air, and her piece of cardboard warned off the flies. "When you're...
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie...
Yeah, said George. I’ll come. But listen, Curley. The poor bastard’s nuts. Don’t shoot ‘im. He di’n’t know what he was doin’.
There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.
There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.
There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of th...
The quality of owning freezes you forever in I, and cuts you off forever from the we.
The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.
That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.
Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow...
Perhaps that might be the way to write this book--to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individualmind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whethe...
Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans
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.
It has always seemed strange to me, said Doc. The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And thos...
Is it responsibility or blame that bothers you? I don't want blame.Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn't carry any pleasant egotism.I was thinking about that time when Sam Hamilton and you and...
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kind...