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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
Interesting
Lasts
Last
Everyone
Stories
Hearer
Great
Rule
Make
Listen
Story

More quotes by 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.
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This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
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I think I love you, Cal. -Abra I'm not good. -Cal Because you're not good. -Abra
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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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There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy
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Do you think it's funny to be so serious when I'm not even out of high school?' she asked. 'I don't see how it could be any other way,' said Lee. 'Laughter comes later, like wisdom teeth, and laughter at yourself comes last of all in a mad race with death, and sometimes it isn't in time.
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...to find where you are going, you must know where you are.
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I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.
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How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.
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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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Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.
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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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To the heavens on the wings of a pig.
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In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.
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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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Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.
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...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
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Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.
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I find out of long experience that I admire all nations and hate all governments
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Within that frame he went a long way and burned a deep scar.
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