John Steinbeck Quotes
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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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Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
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A man is a lonely thing.
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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.
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Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
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I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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'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.'
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No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
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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.
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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.
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I have never even wondered about the comparative standing of writers. I don't understand that. Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.
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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.
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His ear heard more than is said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.
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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.
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In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
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Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
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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.
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'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.'
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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.
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I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.