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It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

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
Always
Fishes
Men
Conviction
Private
Intelligence
Coming
Loses
Fishing
Literature
Puts
Nature
Fish

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Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.
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Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.
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I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.
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It requires self-esteem to receive-not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.
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The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
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[He] fell right into the oldest conviction in the world-- that the girl you are in love with can't possibly be anything but true and honest.
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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.
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But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.
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I know this... a man got to do what he got to do.
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A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.
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I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.
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I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn't mean no harm, George.
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
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for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.
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There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.
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The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.
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Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris, I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills. slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts~ It had been to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency.
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One can't be happy as I have been for very long. There's a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate.
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New York is a wonderful city... It is going to be the capital of the world.
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I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.
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