John Steinbeck Quotes
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Time is the only critic without ambition.
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Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
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'Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.'
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Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
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The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.
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I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
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He brought his malformed wisdom, his pool-hall, locker-room, joke-book wisdom to the front.
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Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Opening sentence.
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Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
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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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One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: 'Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.'
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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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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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A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
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Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
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A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
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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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Well, God knows he don't need any brains to buck barley bags. But don't you try to put nothing over, Milton. I got my eye on you.
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A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
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To be alive at all is to have scars.
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I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
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'Well, that glove's fulla vaseline.''Vaseline? What the hell for?'Well, I tell ya what - Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife.'
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A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.