Why do men like me want sons? he wondered. It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone.

I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.

I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

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.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.