John Steinbeck

Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s the way they say it.

I learned that all of my manuscripts have been rejected three or four times since I last heard. It is a nice thing to know that so many people are reading my books. That is one way of getting an audience.

One can’t be happy as I have been for very long. There’s a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate.

The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.

I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.

Niagara Falls is very nice. I’m very glad I saw it, because from now on if I am asked whether I have seen Niagara Falls I can say yes, and be telling the truth for once.

There’s so much horseshit about babies; schools change every ten years. [My sister] raised a couple of nice ones by forcing them to be considerate or leave the room.... I think people act the way they’re expected to act.

Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, $0 will our speech become one speech.

And if I go alone, I don’t even have to talk.

I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.

I' would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.

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

One pays for everything, the trick is not to pay too much of anything for anything.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.

The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn’t occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.

[New York] isn’t like the rest of the country—it’s like a nation itself-—more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.

New York is a wonderful city.... It is going to be the capital of the world.

In nature two things do not occur—the wheel and good taste.

[T]he warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.

I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

There is one thing pleasantly unconfusing about medicine. The direction and the end are fixed and the patient never works backward.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was upon me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.

The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant.

American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.

A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature—“The sky is falling,” cried Henny- Penny, “and a piece of it fell on my tail.”

Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn’t important enough to me to be an obsession.

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

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words “The Great Divide” and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.

I’m back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

Luck or tragedy, some people get runs. Then of course there are those who divide it even, good and bad, but we never hear of them. Such a life doesn’t demand attention. Only the people who get the good or bad runs.

What do I want in a doctor? Perhaps more than anything else—a friend with special knowledge.

Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.

I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There’s nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn't return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different.