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John Steinbeck

204 quotes

“The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening covey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For a while I was a vicious fighter but it wasn't to win. It was to get it over and get the hell out of there. And I never would have done it at all if other people hadn't put me in the ring. The only private fights I ever had were those I couldn't get away from.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have never even wondered about the comparative standing of writers. I don't understand that. Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can remember the horror which came over my parents when they became convinced that it was so with me [that I wanted to be a writer]—and properly so. What you have and they had to look forward to is life made intolerable by a mean, cantankerous, opinionated, moody, quarrelsome, unreasonable, nervous, flighty, irresponsible son. You will get no loyalty, little consideration and desperately little attention from him. In fact you will want to kill him. I'm sure my father and mother often must have considered poisoning me.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through — not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: January 29, 1951
“I like a chapter to have design of tone, as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should be almost able to stand alone. If this is done then the breaks we call chapters are not arbitrary but rather articulations which allow the free movement of the story.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: March 7, 1951
“... 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.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: September 3, 1951
“I have noticed so many of the reviews of my work show a fear and hatred of ideas and speculations. It seems to be true that people can only take parables fully clothed with flesh. Any attempt to correlate in terms of thought is frightening. And if that is so, East of Eden is going to take a bad beating because it is full of such things.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: October 10, 1951
“A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a letter to Pascal Covici (1952)
“Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the law. The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplementary.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If lowborn men could stand up to those born to rule, religion, government, the whole world would fall to pieces." "So it would," she said. "So it will." "I don't believe you," Ewain said. "But for the sake of the discussion, what then, my lady?" "Why then — then the pieces would have to be put together again." "By such as these—?" "Who else? Who indeed else?”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feeling and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man — if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man — there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton (14 March 1958)
“An artist should be open on all sides to every kind of light and darkness.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton (20 April 1959)
“Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Appendix, letter to Chase Horton (8 June 1959)
“I can tell you one thing I have finally faced through — the Arthurian cycle and practically all lasting and deep-seated folklore is a mixture of profundity and childish nonsense. If you keep the profundity and throw out the nonsense, some essence is lost. These are dream stories, fixed and universal dreams, and they have the inconsistency of dreams.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis (June 1959)
“Most people live in a half-dream all their lives and call it reality.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis (25 July 1959)
“[On writing:] It is properly called the lonesomest profession in the world.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis (22 August 1959)
“Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is the only critic without ambition.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1902–1968) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his literary agent, found on his desk after his death in 1968
“I must go over into the interior valleys. ... There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads. Do you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. ... The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. ... I'll do what I can. ... Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Elizabeth Otis (1938), as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch, p. 37
“You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can't be printed. It is bad because it isn't honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but — I'm not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can't do satire. I've written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. ... My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can't do better I have slipped badly. And that I won't admit — yet.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Elizabeth Otis, expressing dissatisfaction with L'Affaire Lettuceburg — a satire he abandoned in favor of work on what became The Grapes of Wrath (c. mid-May 1938) as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbec…
“The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America and Americans (1966)
“Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs may be graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. Two inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point on anything can happen.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mr. Pritchard was a businessman, president of a medium-sized corporation. He was never alone. His business was conducted by groups of men like himself who joined together in clubs so that no foreign element or idea could enter. His religious life was again his lodge and his church, both of which were screened and protected. One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players. Wherever he went he was not one man but a unit in a corporation, a unit in a club, in a lodge, in a church, in a political party. His thoughts and ideas were never subjected to criticism since he willingly associated only with people like himself. He read a newspaper written by and for his group. The books that came into his house were chosen by a committee which deleted material that might irritate him. He hated foreign countries and foreigners because it was difficult to find his counterpart in them. He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it. At occasional stags where naked girls danced on the tables and sat in great glasses of wine, Mr. Pritchard howled with laughter and drank the wine, but five hundred Mr. Pritchards were there with him.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He wondered why he stayed with her. Just pure laziness, he guessed. He didn't want to go through the emotional turmoil of leaving her. In spite of himself he'd worry about her and it was too much trouble. He'd need another woman right away and that took a lot of talking and arguing and persuading. It was different just to lay a girl but he would need a woman around, and that was the difference. You got used to one and it was less trouble.[…] But there was another reason too. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. And you can't leave a thing like that. It's a structure and it has an architecture, and you can't leave it without tearing off a piece of yourself. So if you want to remain whole you stay no matter how much you may dislike staying. Juan was not a man who fooled himself very much.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn't. Couldn't because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred's life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. "What a foul thing to think," she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man. Although she might be puzzled by these differences between man and woman, she knew them and accepted them and needed them. Of course she would follow him, there was no question of that. Sometimes the quality of woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation, could cut through Kino's manness and save them all.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us go," we said, "into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too." And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among primitives sometimes evil is escaped by never mentioning the name, as in Malaysia, where one never mentions a tiger by name for fear of calling him. Among others, as even among ourselves, the giving of a name establishes a familiarity which renders the thing impotent. It is interesting to see how some scientists and philosophers, who are an emotional and fearful group, are able to protect themselves against fear. In a modern scene, when the horizons stretch out and your philosopher is likely to fall off the world like a Dark Age mariner, he can save himself by establishing a taboo-box which he may call "mysticism" or "supernaturalism" or "radicalism." Into this box he can throw all those thoughts which frighten him and thus be safe from them.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success. A man — a viewing-point man — while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who though possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term “good” with “weak survival quotient” and the term “bad” with “strong survival quotient.” Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished…”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning blows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. 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 to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about. Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being. This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world — of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man — and the Word is with Men.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) said by 1968 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source