Quote

If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

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
Last
Everyone
Stories
Hearer
Great
Rule
Make
Listen
Story
Interesting
Lasts

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.
John Steinbeck
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All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.
John Steinbeck
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The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
John Steinbeck
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She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.
John Steinbeck
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We know what we got, and we don't care whether you know it or not.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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They're a dark people with a gift for suffering way past their deserving. It's said that without whiskey to soak and soften the world, they'd kill themselves. (Irish)
John Steinbeck
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A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.
John Steinbeck
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
John Steinbeck
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A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.
John Steinbeck
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My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.
John Steinbeck
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Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
John Steinbeck
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Thou mayest rule over sin.
John Steinbeck
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You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?
John Steinbeck
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I guess there are never enough books.
John Steinbeck
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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?
John Steinbeck
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How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind.
John Steinbeck
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... every little boy thinks he invented sin.
John Steinbeck