writer, screenwriter, war correspondent, novelist, scientific collector
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1902 – 1968
Such is the prestige of the Nobel award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages.
The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry in defeat — for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
With humanity's long proud history of standing firm against natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest potential victory.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.
The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
And now, our submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.
Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.
The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.
The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.
I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.
I guess this is why I hate governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by the fine print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.
He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.
Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening convey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.
Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.
A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.
He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.
A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.
Time is the only critic without ambition.
It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
I have owed you this letter for a very long time — but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.
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.
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.
I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
No one wants advice - only corroboration.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
Time is the only critic without ambition.
I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.
Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning.
Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.
In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.
I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
In every bit of honest writing in the world … there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.
It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way.
For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.
Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor … And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
All hell has broken loose. I admit our Russian is limited, but we can say hello, come in, you are beautiful, oh no you don't. … So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda. Something has slipped badly.
No little appetite or pain, no carelessness or meanness in him escaped her; no thought or dream or longing in him ever reached her. And yet several times in her life she had seen the stars.
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: “Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.”
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
The profession of book-writing makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business.
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
If lowborn men could stand up to those born to rule, religion, government, the whole world would fall to pieces...[Merlin replies]...So it would; so it will ... then the pieces will be put together again by such as destroyed it.
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
Well, God knows he don't need any brains to buck barley bags. But don't you try to put nothing over, Milton. I got my eye on you.
What the hell kind of bed you giving us, anyways. We don’t want no pants rabbits.
Well, that glove's fulla vaseline."Well, I tell ya what — Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife.
His ear heard more than is said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.
Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.
We could live offa the fatta the lan’.
Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody — to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.
They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head.
I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.
You watch your place, nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy, it ain't even funny.
You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell.
For man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. [Opening sentence.]
Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
It has always seemed strange to me," said Doc. "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.
He was a fine steady man, Juan Chicoy, part Mexican and part Irish, perhaps fifty years old, with clear black eyes, a good head of hair, and a dark and handsome face. Mrs Chicoy was insanely in love with him and a little afraid of him too, because he was a man, and there aren't very many of them, as Alice Chicoy had found out. There aren't very many of them in the world, as everyone finds out sooner or later.
Her body and her mind were sluggish and lazy, and deep down she fought a tired envy of the people who, so she thought, experienced good things while she went through life a gray cloud in a gray room. Having few actual perceptions, she lived by rules. Education is good. Self-control is necessary. Everything in its time and place. Travel is broadening. And it was this last axiom which had forced her finally on the vacation to Mexico.
He didn't believe in psychiatrists, he said. But actually he did believe in them, so much that he was afraid of them.
For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.
A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.
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.
When you argue with a child," she said warmly, "you give a good argument and the child says yah, yah! You understand him and he doesn't listen, so the child wins.
Victor's unfortunate choice it was always to mis-see, to mis-hear, to misjudge. He read softness into her because of the softness of her voice, when she was only remembering. His was the self-centered chaos of childhood. All looks and thoughts, loves and hatreds, were directed at him. Softness was softness towards him, weakness was weakness in the face of his strength. He preheard answers and listened not. He was full-coloured and brilliant—all outside of him was pale.
Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.
He brought his malformed wisdom, his pool-hall, locker-room, joke-book wisdom to the front.
It’s all fine to say, “Time will heal everything, this too shall pass away. People will forget”—and things like that when you are not involved, but when you are there is no passage of time, people do not forget and you are in the middle of something that does not change.
Mordeen said: "I used to wonder why this love seemed sweeter than I had ever known, better than many people ever know. And then one day the reason came to me. There are very few great Anythings in the world. In work and art and emotion—the great is very rare. And I have one of the great and beautiful. Now say your yah, yah, Victor, like a child unanswerably answering Wisdom. You will have to do that, I think."
His guard was up now and he wasn't listening; he was only angry because here was a world he could not enter and so he had to disbelieve in its existence. He fell back on the world he knew.
It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
I do understand. I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance.
It is so easy a thing to give—only great men have the courage and courtesy and, yes, the generosity to receive.
We are no better than the animals; in fact in a lot of ways we aren't as good.
What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.
Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.
No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time — he can never return to simplicity.
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
I'm sorry," Ethan said. "You have taught me something — maybe three things, rabbit footling mine. Three things will never be believed — the true, the probable, and the logical. I know now where to get the money to start my fortune.
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.
They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
To be alive at all is to have scars.
No one wants advice, only corroboration.
There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.
All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.
Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
Strength and success— they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.
Not only the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.
Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is — and a woman too, I guess.
… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.
There's nobody as lonely as an all-married man.
A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.
A man is a lonely thing.
My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.
It is odd 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 have never heard of a man tell of it.
Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start.
When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it's complicated.
What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why.
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.
In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence — but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself. 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.
Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?