“And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later…”

Letter to Elizabeth Otis, expressing dissatisfaction with L'Affaire Lettuceburg — a satire he abandoned in favor of work on what became The Grapes of Wrath (c. mid-May 1938) as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch, p. 38
Context: You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can't be printed. It is bad because it isn't honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but — I'm not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can't do satire. I've written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. … My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can't do better I have slipped badly. And that I won't admit — yet.

In an interview from Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball

Diary entry (December 1904), # 583, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
1903 - 1910

Source: The Great Gatsby

Source: Lonesome Dove

Act I
The Three Sisters (1901)

Source: How Proust Can Change Your Life

Source: Unwind