Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn't important enough to me to be an obsession.
John Steinbeck..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.
John SteinbeckI need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.
John SteinbeckLiterature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. --speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962
John SteinbeckWhat a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.
John SteinbeckLook at them. There are your true philosophers. I think that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else.
John Steinbeck