I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.