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



One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
John Steinbeck

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. - John Steinbeck

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.
John Steinbeck

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. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
John Steinbeck

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.
John Steinbeck

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
John Steinbeck

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

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
John Steinbeck

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

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

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.
John Steinbeck

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
John Steinbeck

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

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
John Steinbeck

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
John Steinbeck

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.
John Steinbeck

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.
John Steinbeck

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.
John Steinbeck

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.
John Steinbeck

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
John Steinbeck

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
John Steinbeck

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
John Steinbeck

Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
John Steinbeck

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.
John Steinbeck

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
John Steinbeck