John Steinbeck Quotes
-
Time is the only critic without ambition.
-
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
-
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
-
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.
-
One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: 'Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.'
-
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
-
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
-
Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.
-
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
-
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
-
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
-
'It is so easy a thing to give-only great men have the courage and courtesy and, yes, the generosity to receive.'
-
A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
-
Strength and success- they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.
-
'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.'
-
'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.'
-
To be alive at all is to have scars.
-
… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.