John Steinbeck quotes

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. (John Steinbeck)
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
John Steinbeck
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck
People do not want advice - they want corroboration.
John Steinbeck
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
John Steinbeck
There's more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.
John Steinbeck
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
To be alive at all is to have scars.
John Steinbeck
I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.
John Steinbeck
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
John Steinbeck
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals. (John Steinbeck)
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
John Steinbeck
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
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
I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
John Steinbeck
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome.
John Steinbeck
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
John Steinbeck
Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
John Steinbeck
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
John Steinbeck
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard. (John Steinbeck)
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
Time is the only critic without ambition.
John Steinbeck
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.
John Steinbeck
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
John Steinbeck