John Steinbeck Quotes
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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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I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
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You watch your place, nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy, it ain't even funny.
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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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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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'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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Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
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A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
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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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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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To be alive at all is to have scars.
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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.
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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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Time is the only critic without ambition.
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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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I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
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Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
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I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.
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Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
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He brought his malformed wisdom, his pool-hall, locker-room, joke-book wisdom to the front.
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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 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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Not only the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.
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Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary - do you hear? Who are you in there?