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I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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
Dedication
Writer
Hold
Literature
Perfectibility
Doe
Gallantry
Believe
Hygiene
Men
Membership
Passionately

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
John Steinbeck
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For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear.
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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.
John Steinbeck
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life passes by in a wink so try to never miss a moment of it
John Steinbeck
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A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick. --John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson
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Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.
John Steinbeck
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It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing to be loved without satiety.
John Steinbeck
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There are places in this world where fable, myth, preconception, love, longing or prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high colored magical confusion takes permanent hold...Surely Texas is such a place.
John Steinbeck
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Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.
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You got to live before you can afford to die.
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Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
John Steinbeck
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You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
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The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.
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I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.
John Steinbeck
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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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As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.
John Steinbeck
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Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.
John Steinbeck
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And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.
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You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
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The power of an attitude is amazing
John Steinbeck