John Steinbeck Quotes
Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
It is the hour of pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.
I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
Then it is better, sir, to love whom one cannot have?" "Probably better," Lancelot said. "Certainly safer.
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.
Some men hunger so much for love that they lose everything that is loveable about them.
I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn't ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.
The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.
Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.
These too are of a burning color--not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
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.
Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.
It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
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.
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
No single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony.
Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him.
All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.
In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.
The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.