John Steinbeck Quotes

The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.

People don't want advice...only corroboration.

I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.

Every man in a bank hates what the bank does and yet the bank does it.

I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.

With a few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.

When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.

We think of strangers as stronger and better than we are.

I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.

Kino heard the little splash of morning waves on the beach. It was very good -- Kino closed his eyes again to listen to his music.

We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.

A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man.

With knowledge there is no hope,... without hope I would sit motionless, rusting like unused armor.

...to find where you are going, you must know where you are.

You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like.

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.

It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.

The last clear definite function of men—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man.

But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.

Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.

The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.

For how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.

American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.

she knew she could help him best by being silent and by being near

And her joy was nearly like sorrow.

I've always taken my hangovers as consequence, not as a punishment.

The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.

My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.

The human is the only guilty animal.

I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.

Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.

Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight - the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards

I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.

Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.

Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.

It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.