I don’t mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don’t want to get nibbled to death. There’s a difference.

Lennie begged, "Le's do it now. Le's get that place now." "Sure right now. I gotta. We gotta.

We may be thankful that frightened civil authorities ... have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights - the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?

For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.

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.