I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
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.
The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
No single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony.
If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away.
This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".
I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
To finish is sadness to a writer — a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
It is a time of quiet joy, the sunny morning. When the glittery dew is on the mallow weeds, each leaf holds a jewel which is beautiful if not valuable. This is no time for hurry or for bustle. Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.
Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
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.
An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.
We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.
I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind.
It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.
It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.
Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
All great and precious things are lonely.
The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.
And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.
It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing.
And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.
There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.
When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.
Socialism is just another form of religion, and thus delusional.
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.
My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.
Time is the only critic without ambition.
If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much - make it greedy, miserable and sick.
All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.
In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.
A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.
They's times when how you feel got to be kep' to yourself.
It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.
A man without words is a man without thought.
A boy becomes a man when a man is needed
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 kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.
Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.
You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff
This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.
Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don't believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.
A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.
I believe that love cannot be bought except with love.
Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.
No one wants advice - only corroboration.
There's nothing in the world like that first taste of beer.
With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.
The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.
Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
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.
People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.
My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.
Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.
To be alive at all is to have scars.
Anything that just costs money is cheap.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.
There's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.
Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.
A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.
I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.
I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.
If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.
It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.
Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain.
There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp.
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.
And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.
There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.
I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms
I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Only mediocrity escapes criticism.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.
