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Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.

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
Bigs
Kills
Back
Guts
Mean
Slowly
Things
Slow
Men
Scared
Nudged
Failure
Rots
Fight
Erosion
Fighting
Knocked

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.
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Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid.
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And you know what it is? San Francisco a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.
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Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
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All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.
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This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
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Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?
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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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What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.
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What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.
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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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To finish is sadness to a writer — a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
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An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.
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Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it.
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A good writer always works at the impossible.
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One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
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I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.
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My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.
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Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.
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I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.
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