John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.

John Steinbeck
My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.

John Steinbeck
A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.

John Steinbeck
The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little 'why'.

John Steinbeck
I have starved and it isn't nearly as bad as is generally supposed. Four days and a half was my longest stretch. Maybe there are pains that come later. Personally I think terror is the painful part of starvation.

John Steinbeck
The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant

John Steinbeck
Fella in business got to lie an' cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That's what's important. You go steal that tire an' you're a thief, but he tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.

John Steinbeck
I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

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

John Steinbeck
Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.

John Steinbeck
I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.

John Steinbeck
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.

John Steinbeck
Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.

John Steinbeck
I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.

John Steinbeck
If you are in love-that's a good thing-that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone.

John Steinbeck
One pays for everything, the trick is not to pay too much of anything for anything.

John Steinbeck
A man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star.

John Steinbeck
The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.

John Steinbeck
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

John Steinbeck
Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

John Steinbeck
I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.

John Steinbeck
And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.

John Steinbeck
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
There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.

John Steinbeck
I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.

John Steinbeck
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.

John Steinbeck
Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America.

John Steinbeck
A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.

John Steinbeck
I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

John Steinbeck
For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear.

John Steinbeck