John Steinbeck

Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

People don’t take trips, trips take people.

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

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

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

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.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

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.

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

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

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

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.

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

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.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

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.

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

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