Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
A man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn’t known—they might call the police.
A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
A dog...is a bond between strangers.
A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many.
It's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.
A tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken.
Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
I don't want advice.' 'Nobody does. It's a giver's present.
[Man] is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job a...
[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.
[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'sai...
You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.
You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk. But watch it, mister. There's a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses - so beautiful - a packet o...
You see, there's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.
You can boast about anything if it's all you have.
When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking.
When I was a kid my ol' man give me a haltered heifer an' says take her down an git her serviced. An' the fella says, I done it, an' ever' time since then when I hear a business man talkin' about serv...