Quotes from John Steinbeck

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.

It's a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

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

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.

Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.

A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?

Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.

I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.

A wife is like a children's movie; always under-appreciated and without either, life would be incomplete.

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

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

Life is knowledge, livin it is Succes!

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.

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

Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.

Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.

life passes by in a wink so try to never miss a moment of it

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.

And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.