John Steinbeck's Quotes

No one wants advice - only corroboration.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

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

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

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.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.