John Steinbeck

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

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”

“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.”

“Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the b-----d.”

“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.”

“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”

“It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”

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

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

“A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.”

“Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.”

“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 B-----d Time.”

“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.”

“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.”