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

Perhaps it takes courage to raise children..

John Steinbeck

Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his...

John Steinbeck

I wonder if he had a Cathy and who she was.

John Steinbeck

Nearly everyone has had a box of secret pain, shared with no one.

John Steinbeck

While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in. silently and greyly, with its head bowed and i...

John Steinbeck

...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the b...

John Steinbeck

Then there were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing.

John Steinbeck

She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some ne...

John Steinbeck

She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it.

John Steinbeck

I eat stories like grapes.

John Steinbeck

If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.

John Steinbeck

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

John Steinbeck

It is easy, out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice!

John Steinbeck

At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

John Steinbeck

Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration ...

John Steinbeck

Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don't believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.

John Steinbeck

There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

John Steinbeck

A man without words is a man without thought.

John Steinbeck

Everything seems to work with a recurring rhythm except life. There is only one birth and only one death. Nothing else is like that.

John Steinbeck

The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.

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

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