1902-1968, American Author
A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
John Steinbeck – [Books and Reading]
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck – [Travel and Tourism]
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
John Steinbeck – [Nostalgia]
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
John Steinbeck – [Critics and Criticism]
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.
John Steinbeck – [Aid and Assistance]
Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.
John Steinbeck – [Life and Living]
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
John Steinbeck – [Humankind]
No one wants advice, only corroboration.
John Steinbeck – [Advice]
Texas is not a state — it's a state of mind.
John Steinbeck – [Mind]
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
John Steinbeck – [Writers and Writing]
The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.
John Steinbeck – [Pollution]
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
John Steinbeck – [Writers and Writing]
The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.
John Steinbeck – [Conversation]
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.
John Steinbeck – [People]
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
John Steinbeck – [America]
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck – [Time and Time Management]
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
John Steinbeck – [Critics and Criticism]
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ''Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought.''
John Steinbeck – [Story and Story-Telling]
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
John Steinbeck – [Travel and Tourism]
Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.
John Steinbeck – [Writers and Writing]