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
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?
Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry n’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.
I guess there are never enough books.
Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans
Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.
People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.
Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.
Courage and fear were one thing too.
I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.
And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.
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.