A Quote by John Steinbeck

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

John Steinbeck

Quote Topics

Explain Inexplicable Loneliness Tries Utter Writer

Quote Author

John Steinbeck
American - Author
February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

When the most learned evolutionists can give neither the how nor the why, the marvels seem to show that adaptation is inexplicable. Yet those who cannot explain it will not admit that it is inexplicable. This is a strange situation, only partly ascribable to the rather unscientific conviction that evidence will be found in the future. It is due to a psychological quirk [in the minds of its advocates].

Norman Macbeth

Don't stigmatize in a rush to explain inexplicable evil.

Ron Fournier

You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness.

Carrie Brownstein

Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

P. D. James

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

Sophie Hannah

Poverty only tries men's souls. It is loneliness that breaks the heart.

Sam Rayburn

When a young writer deliberately tries to create an effect, the result is often a little self-conscious and overdone. But why is it so hard for us to glory in what the writer has tried to do, or even in the very fact that the writer has deliberately tried to do something?

Lucy Calkins

the sentiment of immediate loss in some sort decayed, while that of utter, irremediable loneliness grew on me with time.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Joan Didion

It is said that life is too short, and that’s quite true, unless you are lonely. Loneliness can bring time to its knees; an absolute and utter standstill.

Jonathan Hull

Religions sprang up among men to deal with the sometimes terrifying aspects of existence, to make sense out of the senseless, to explain things we find inexplicable.

Gore Vidal

If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

Luis Gonzalez

When an older writer tries to tell a younger writer through a review what kind of career she should be pursuing, it tends to speak to the reviewer's anxieties rather than the book itself.

Jennifer Weiner

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.