John Steinbeck Quotes

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

For the most part people are not curious except about themselves.

Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.

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

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

And 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. This is what I am and what I am about.

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

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 suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.

A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three [great teachers] did not tell - they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious.

I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George.

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?

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.

If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much - make it greedy, miserable and sick.

...to find where you are going, you must know where you are.

A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery not easily to be solved. News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences.

The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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

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

I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.

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

Socialism never took root in America.

she knew she could help him best by being silent and by being near

A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically.

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

I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.

All we got is the family unbroke.

We know what we got, and we don't care whether you know it or not.

I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.

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

Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.

He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man.

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

No one wants advice - only corroboration.

Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.

Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.

There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments

A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson

Show me the man who isn't interested in discussing himself.

Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.