Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.
John Steinbeck
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Like
Cowardly
Dull
Clever
Ugly
Brave
Beautiful
Book
Men
More quotes by John Steinbeck
In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.
John Steinbeck
A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.
John Steinbeck
The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert.
John Steinbeck
At about 10 o'clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars.
John Steinbeck
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
John Steinbeck
All of them had a restlessness in common.
John Steinbeck
I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.
John Steinbeck
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
Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
John Steinbeck
The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.
John Steinbeck
So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.
John Steinbeck
You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.
John Steinbeck
I'm back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.
John Steinbeck
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.
John Steinbeck
A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.
John Steinbeck
But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.
John Steinbeck
This was an evil beyond thinking. The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.
John Steinbeck
A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
John Steinbeck
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
John Steinbeck
We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.
John Steinbeck
