You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway. John Steinbeck
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. John Steinbeck
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
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world. John Steinbeck
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
I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate. John Steinbeck