Quotes By John Steinbeck

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.