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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.

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
Character
Carry
Book
East
Eden
Whole
Necessary
Sentence
Writing
Single
Background
Think
Either
Backgrounds
Thinking
Story
Sentences
Stories
Provide
Doe
Develop

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.
John Steinbeck
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This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
John Steinbeck
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But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me - why, we're all that's been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's us. This land, this red land, is us and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can't start again.
John Steinbeck
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We have to make a mark, even if it's only a scribble.
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.
John Steinbeck
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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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Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world
John Steinbeck
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There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.
John Steinbeck
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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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The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
John Steinbeck
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Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
John Steinbeck
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Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
John Steinbeck
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I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.
John Steinbeck
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Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
John Steinbeck
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An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.
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For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear.
John Steinbeck