John Steinbeck Quotes

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

He is so stupid you can't trust him with an idea.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

People do not want advice - they want corroboration.

So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out.

It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.

He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.

Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.

Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.

The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert.

We could live offa the fatta the lan'.

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.

We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.

Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world

Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.

And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

We have to make a mark, even if it's only a scribble.

To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-"The sky is falling," cried Henny-Penny, "and a piece of it fell on my tail.

If I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an' work, an' no trouble.

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.

No one who is young is ever going to be old.

In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms

There is nothing pleasanter than spading when the ground is soft and damp.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.

Trouble with mice is you always kill 'em.

The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy

I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.

There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.

I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.

The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.

One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.

A wife is like a children's movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans

Courage and fear were one thing too.