Quotes By John Steinbeck

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

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

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

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

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.

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

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

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.

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

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.