John Steinbeck Quotes

One of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he is best known for his novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Great Depression.
(1902 - 1968)

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. [Marriage]

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

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

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. [Success]

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming. [Against]

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. [Problems]