1,374 Quotes by John Steinbeck

We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.

Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.

To the heavens on the wings of a pig.

We think of strangers as stronger and better than we are.

Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to speak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practised it through the ages.

My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other. . .

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.