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.

It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.

It is strange how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place. Everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

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

You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

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