We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Blessings, Success, Safety, Gratitude, Security, Change, Appreciation
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
Topics: Remembrance
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
Topics: Storytelling
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
I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Weather
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
The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Americans
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Xenophobia
Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Critics, Criticism
What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?
—John Steinbeck
It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.
—John Steinbeck
Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, 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
Topics: Conversation
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Fear
Time is the only critic without ambition.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Time Management, Ambition, Time
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
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, Sleep, Adversity, Morning
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
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
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
Topics: Reading, Books
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
I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.
—John Steinbeck
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
—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
Topics: Writers
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Marriage, Travel, Journeys, Tourism
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
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
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
Texas is not a state—it’s a state of mind.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Mind, The Mind
I hold that a writer who does not passionately elieve in the perfectibility of man has no edication nor any membership in literature.
—John Steinbeck
Topics: Dedication
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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