1,374 Quotes by John Steinbeck

They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

The calm and the sorrow were so great that they bore down on his chest, and the loneliness was complete, a circle impenetrable.

In a house where the littlest statement automatically marshalled crushing forces of argument against itself, she had learned to be silent.

He's eating God the way a bear eats meat against the winter.

He felt a desire to open his body for her inspection, so that she could see all the hidden things in him, even the things he did not know were there.

Those thoughts she had kept weak and pale and hidden in the recesses of her brain, just out of thinking vision, came out into the open, and she saw that they were not foul and loathesome like slugs, as she had always believed, but somehow light and gay and holy.

Anything that just costs money is cheap.

And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

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.