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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.

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
Convincing
Dialogue
Best
Writing
Way
Make

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.
John Steinbeck
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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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I guess there are never enough books.
John Steinbeck
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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.
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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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 don't cost money to ask.
John Steinbeck
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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?
John Steinbeck
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I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.
John Steinbeck
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It requires self-esteem to receive-not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.
John Steinbeck
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Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him.
John Steinbeck
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My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.
John Steinbeck
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A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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All of them had a restlessness in common.
John Steinbeck
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How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?
John Steinbeck
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When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
John Steinbeck
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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. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
John Steinbeck
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Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody - to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.
John Steinbeck
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Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.
John Steinbeck