John Steinbeck Quotes
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He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.
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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.
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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.
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You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
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The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.
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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.
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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.
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A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.
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My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
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All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.
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Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
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How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
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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.
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For a while I was a vicious fighter but it wasn't to win. It was to get it over and get the hell out of there. And I never would have done it at all if other people hadn't put me in the ring. The only private fights I ever had were those I couldn't get away from.
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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.
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We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.