Mad at the World Quotes

“A couple of years earlier, Steinbeck had explained his writing technique to his sister Mary. It began with the faint idea for a story. This was followed by a long period of contemplation, during which he invented one character after another and began to study them. He said it was important to set aside time every day for this—it could be a couple of hours in the morning, though he admitted he usually spent more time than that. The main thing was to think about the characters until he could see them. Eventually he learned everything about them. Where they were from, how they dressed, what their voices sounded like, the shape and texture of their hands—the total picture. Once they were clearly visible to him, he started building their back stories, adding details and events to their lives from before he knew them. He wouldn’t use all of this information, but it was important to have it in order to better gauge the characters, to the point where they stood free of his conscious involvement and began to think and act independently. Gradually, he said, they would begin to talk to him on their own, so that he not only heard them speaking but started to have an idea about why they said the things they did. As the characters came to life, they inhabited his thoughts day and night, especially just before he went to sleep. Then he could “let things happen to them” and study their reactions. Eventually, he reached a point where he started fitting them into the story he had begun. Once the characters were his full partners, that’s when he started to write. He thought this method could work for anyone, and said the real secret was to stay under control and resist the temptation to push too hard. Some writers worked for a fixed period of time every day. Others counted their words—as he did. Sticking to one method or the other was important, he said, otherwise your eagerness to be done takes over. He said writing a long novel goes on for months or years. When it’s done you feel “terrible.” That was how it was for him.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“It happens. Life (or death) taps you on the shoulder, interrupts what you’re doing, and suddenly you find that nobody has been bothering you but yourself.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“John Steinbeck tried to tell the story every writer hopes to get right, which is only how it was during one small chapter of history. It is not much to ask, but the hardest thing on earth to do.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“He said his heart had always been good to him and he wasn’t going to insult it now by being careful with it.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“He had been “drunken” on their rhythms. But now his mind had gone silent, and sitting alone with nothing to do in his remote cabin, all seemed lost. The wind rattled at the door. “It is sad,” Steinbeck said in closing, “when the snow is falling.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“What the critics saw from book to book—but failed to detect as a linkage among all of them—was Steinbeck’s anger. He was America’s most pissed-off writer. “All his work,” Gray wrote, “steams with indignation at injustice, with contempt for false piety, with scorn for the cunning and self-righteousness of an economic system that encourages exploitation, greed, and brutality.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“By failing to observe and understand groups, we fail to see how the world actually works and instead find ourselves surrounded by “meaningless, unrelated and destructive phenomena.” It’s arguable that in In Dubious Battle Steinbeck’s point about crowds was that the only way to understand them is to watch them and see how they behave—to, as Doc Burton puts it, see the superorganism in action.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“When a farm or a family is stricken, nature destroys what humankind has made. Houses peel and crumble. Tilled fields are subsumed by weeds and grasses. Well-tended orchards become knotted, spectral forests. The earth, given an opening, always reclaims itself and obliterates order—erasing the outward evidence of an agrarian society.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“The Steinbeck house was full of books, and as John’s sister Beth recalled, “The choice was ours.” Some years later Steinbeck reckoned that the books he immersed himself in as a boy were “realer than experience.” He didn’t remember them as books, but as “something that happened to me.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck

“And in the end, Jody again has his pony—but at the terrible cost of learning even the most wondrous gifts are sometimes impermanent.”
― William Souder, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck