John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

John Steinbeck
Fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live – for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken... fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

John Steinbeck
I guess this is why I hate governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by the fine print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

John Steinbeck
A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

John Steinbeck
The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.

John Steinbeck
If you are using dialogue — say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

John Steinbeck
It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.

John Steinbeck
You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.

John Steinbeck
He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row

John Steinbeck
It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

John Steinbeck
A funeral isn't for the dead. You'll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won't even be there.

John Steinbeck
It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.

John Steinbeck
I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.

John Steinbeck
The medical profession is unconsciously irritated by lay knowledge.

John Steinbeck
I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

John Steinbeck
There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

John Steinbeck
He was an arithmetician rather than a mathematician. None of the humor, the music, or the mysticism of higher mathematics ever entered his head.

John Steinbeck
Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

John Steinbeck
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.

John Steinbeck
Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.

John Steinbeck
Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills. slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts~ It had been to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.

John Steinbeck
Man is related... inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.. [P]lankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

John Steinbeck
In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb VACILAR... It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.

John Steinbeck
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.

John Steinbeck
There are good things to see in the tide pools and there are exciting and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.

John Steinbeck
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.

John Steinbeck
It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.

John Steinbeck
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

John Steinbeck
Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime, and often he has to be left at home. He knows we are going long before the suitcase has come out, and he paces and worries and whines and goes into a state of mild hysteria.

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