John Steinbeck Quotations

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

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.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

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.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

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.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

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.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

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.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

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.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

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.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

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.

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.

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.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: ""Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.

One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: "Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.

No one is more carnal than a recent virgin

Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue, they's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

There are some among us who live in rooms of experience we can never enter

Just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, aquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and selfinterest are the traits of sucess. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.

I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.

You give me much good counsel. I am tired of it.

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.

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.

American cities are like badger holes ringed with trash

Fear the day when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, distinctive in the universe.

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.

It is the nature of a man as he grows older- to protest against change, particularly changes for the better

Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat add victory.

The justice system has opened a revolving door to let repeat offenders out of custody. These people are predators, and they are preying on our children.

This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn't exist. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person, a real person you know, or an imagined person -- and write to that one.

Got a lot of sinful ideas. But they seem kinda sensible.

Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don't mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that's the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

Well, I remember this girl. I am not whole without her. I am not alive without her. When she was with me I was more alive than I have ever been, and not only when she was pleasant either. Even when we were fighting I was whole.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans

I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar - if he is financially fortunate.

Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.

I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.

Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.

I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had. John Steinbeck in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

A man without words is a man without thought.

As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.

An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

Socialism is just another form of religion, and thus delusional.

Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fences, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our own hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

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.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.

Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

Do you take pride in your hurt?' Samuel asked. 'Does it make you seem large and tragic? . . . Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience . . . there's all that fallow land, and here beside me is all that fallow man. It seems a waste. And I have a bad feeling about waste because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let your life lie fallow?