John Steinbeck

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.