Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.
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
Lines
Shyness
Prayer
Prayers
Suffering
Suffer
Fear
Terror
Firsts
Putting
First
Amazing
Assails
Always
Line
Straightening
Magic
Terrors
More quotes by John Steinbeck
Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.
John Steinbeck
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
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.
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
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
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
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
John Steinbeck
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
Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.
John Steinbeck
Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn't important enough to me to be an obsession.
John Steinbeck
Kino heard the little splash of morning waves on the beach. It was very good -- Kino closed his eyes again to listen to his music.
John Steinbeck
for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.
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
He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
John Steinbeck
I don’t mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don’t want to get nibbled to death. There’s a difference.
John Steinbeck
The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.
John Steinbeck
No one knows my ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time.
John Steinbeck
I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.
John Steinbeck
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.
John Steinbeck
It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.
John Steinbeck