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
Topics: Conversation
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 …
—John Steinbeck
The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man’s litter has more permanence.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Nature
I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.
—John Steinbeck
I know now why confusion in government is not only tolerated but encouraged. I have learned. A confused people can make no clear demands.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Government
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
—John Steinbeck
It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.
—John Steinbeck
Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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
Topics: Challenges
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Individuality
Once I traveled about in an old bakery wagon, double-doored rattler with a mattress on the floor, I stopped where people stopped or gathered, I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of my country the accuracy of which was impaired only by my own shortcomings.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Travel
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?
—John Steinbeck
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now—only that place where the books are kept.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Books
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Critics, Criticism
Texas is not a state—it’s a state of mind.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Mind, The Mind
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
Topics: America
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: One liners, Weather
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.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Relaxation, Adversity, Sleep, Morning
No one wants advice—only corroboration.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Advice
Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Xenophobia
The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: War
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Ideas
When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Legacy
The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Light
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Fear
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
Topics: Dogs
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Travel, Tourism, Marriage, Journeys
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Saul Bellow Canadian-born American Novelist
- William Faulkner American Novelist
- Pearl S. Buck American Novelist
- Willa Cather American Novelist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Bernard Malamud American Novelist
- John D. MacDonald American Novelist
- F. Scott Fitzgerald American Novelist
- Ken Kesey American Novelist
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