Quotes by John Steinbeck

About John Steinbeck:

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Red Pony (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), widely attributed to be part of the American literary canon, is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece. In the first 75 years since it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

John Steinbeck

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

John Steinbeck

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

John Steinbeck

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

John Steinbeck

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

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

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

John Steinbeck

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.

John Steinbeck

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.

John Steinbeck

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

John Steinbeck

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

John Steinbeck

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

John Steinbeck

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their resp...

John Steinbeck

There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every ...

John Steinbeck

I don't want advice.' 'Nobody does. It's a giver's present.

John Steinbeck

Smile and thank God, that you are alive today!

John Steinbeck

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spen...

John Steinbeck

Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the s...

John Steinbeck

All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent

John Steinbeck

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.

John Steinbeck

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

John Steinbeck

Author Bio

  • NameJohn Steinbeck
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • AliasesJohn Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.
  • BornFebruary 27, 1902
  • DiedDecember 20, 1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Screenwriter; Journalist; Novelist
  • WorksOf Mice And Men; The Grapes Of Wrath; East Of Eden
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Presidential Medal Of Freedom; National Book Award