A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
- John Steinbeck Quote

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
- John Steinbeck Quote

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
- John Steinbeck Quote

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
- John Steinbeck Quote

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
- John Steinbeck Quote

No one wants advice - only corroboration.
- John Steinbeck Quote

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
- John Steinbeck Quote

The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
- John Steinbeck Quote

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
- John Steinbeck Quote

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.
- John Steinbeck Quote