Journal of a Novel Quotes

“But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I'll never get used to being alive. It's a mystery. Always startled to find I've survived.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“All this is a preface to the fear and uncertainties which clamber over a man so that in his silly work he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“I intended to make it sound guileless and rather sweet but you will see in it the little blades of social criticism without which no book is worth a fart in hell.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“I think perhaps I am one of those lucky mortals whose work and whose life are the same thing.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“There is one thing I don’t think any one has ever set down although it is true—to a monster, everyone else is a monster.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“We will have to see whether the practicing through the years has prepared me for the writing of a book. For this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write. We shall see whether I am capable. Surely I feel humble in the face of this work. And as our Roman friends would say when casting outside themselves for help, Ora pro mihi. February”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“Her life is one of revenge on other people because of a vague feeling of her own lack. A man born blind must in a sense hate eyes as well as envy them. A blind man might wish to remove all of the eyes in the world.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“I can tell all I want about them now because they are all dead and they won’t resent the truth about themselves.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, 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. If he does not, the work is not worth even what it otherwise might have been.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“For I truly believe that people call their lives to them the way you'd whistle up a dog. I seem to thrive in small frustrations and make them up when I don't have them. This is not abnormal. In fact it is very supernormal.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

“A great many never come to know that there are other rivers. Perhaps that knowledge is saved for maturity and very few people ever mature. It is enough if they flower and reseed. That is all that nature requires of them. But sometimes in a man or a woman an awareness takes place--not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness the writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through--not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, this has not happened to me. The same blind effort, the straining and puffing go on in me. And always I hope that a little trickles through. This urge dies hard.”
― John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters