Top 697 Quotes & Sayings by John Steinbeck - Page 3

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author John Steinbeck.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
Anything that just costs money is cheap.
There's nothing in the world like that first taste of beer.
I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why. — © John Steinbeck
I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.
A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.
You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.
Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.
Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans
We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.
I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
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.
Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fences, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our own hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
Only through immitation do we develop toward originality. — © John Steinbeck
Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.
A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.
I guess there are never enough books.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.
Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.
Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.
Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don't believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.
I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.
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.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.
But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.
We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.
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.
Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them. — © John Steinbeck
Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.
He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow.
Some men hunger so much for love that they lose everything that is loveable about them.
They's times when how you feel got to be kep' to yourself.
An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.
To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.
People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.
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.
Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.
A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it. — © John Steinbeck
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
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.
When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.... The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. I fear the disease is incurable.
..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.
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.
Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.
No single organism could be understood without observing and comprehending the entire colony.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
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