A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.

If you want to keep a friend, never test him.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant

... every little boy thinks he invented sin.

A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.