Quotes

“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

“Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.” John Steinbeck

“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.” John Steinbeck

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” John Steinbeck

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.” John Steinbeck

“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” John Steinbeck

“Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.” John Steinbeck

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.” John Steinbeck

“It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.” John Steinbeck

“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.” John Steinbeck

“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.” John Steinbeck

“Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.” John Steinbeck

“I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.” John Steinbeck

“I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.” John Steinbeck

“We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.” John Steinbeck

“Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.” John Steinbeck

“I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.” John Steinbeck

“One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.” John Steinbeck

“Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.” John Steinbeck

“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.” John Steinbeck

“No one wants advice - only corroboration.” John Steinbeck

“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.” John Steinbeck

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

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

“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.” John Steinbeck

“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.” John Steinbeck

“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.” John Steinbeck

“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.” John Steinbeck

“In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.” John Steinbeck

“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.” John Steinbeck