John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flatand Cannery Row, the multi-generation epic East of Eden, and the novellas Of Mice and Menand The Red Pony. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth27 February 1902
CountryUnited States of America
Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.
Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.
I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt- and there is the story of mankind.
The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there.... It would be good to know the impulse truly, not to be confused by the 'services to science' platitudes or the other little mazes into which we entice our minds so that they will not know what we are doing.
What hidden, hoarded longings there are in all of us.
... a man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star.
I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.
It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.
American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.
... you must not expect to find that people understand what they do.
(About the movies:) Well, I git enough of sorrow. I like to git away from it.
There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.