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Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck
Age: 66 †
Born: 1902
Born: February 27
Died: 1968
Died: December 20
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Salinas
California
John Ernst Steinbeck
Jr.
John Ernst Steinbeck
John Ernest Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
Steinbeck
Unless
Courage
Give
Bastard
Giving
Reviewer
Unqualified
Reviewers
Ignore
Praise

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
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The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.
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The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.
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A man without words is a man without thought.
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Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.
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And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
John Steinbeck
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And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.
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The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-The sky is falling, cried Henny-Penny, and a piece of it fell on my tail.
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It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?
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It seems to me Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda.
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Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
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Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.
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Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.
John Steinbeck
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American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash--all of them--surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.
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The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.
John Steinbeck
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The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant
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I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George.
John Steinbeck
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I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.
John Steinbeck
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This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
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No one knows my ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.
John Steinbeck