Quotes By John Steinbeck

Time is the only critic without ambition.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

No one wants advice - only corroboration.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

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

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

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

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.

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

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

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.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

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.

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

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.