Quotes By 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.

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.

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

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.

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

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

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.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

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

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