Don't you dare take the lazy way. It's too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don't let me catch you doing it! Now -- look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.

The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.

Anything that just costs money is cheap.

Maybe-- maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure-- never sure of her because you aren't sure of yourself?

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.