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The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgmentsocial, political, or ethicalcan raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.
-John Steinbeck
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How can we live without our lives? How will we know its us without our past?
-John Steinbeck
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Advice
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No one wants advice -- only corroboration.
-John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
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America
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This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
-John Steinbeck
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Authors & Writing
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Writers are a little below the clowns and a little above the trained seals.
-John Steinbeck
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The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
-John Steinbeck
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The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
-John Steinbeck
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To finish is a sadness to a writer - a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
-John Steinbeck
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Conversation
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The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.
-John Steinbeck
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Criticism
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Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.
-John Steinbeck
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Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
-John Steinbeck
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Dogs
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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.
-John Steinbeck
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Football
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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.
-John Steinbeck
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Help
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If you're in trouble, or hurt or need -- go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help -- the only ones.
-John Steinbeck
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Humanity
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No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
-John Steinbeck
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Individuality
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And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
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Legacy
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When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people.
-John Steinbeck, Once There Was A War, New York: Bantam, p.65., 1958
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Life
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Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.
-John Steinbeck
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Light
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The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.
-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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Mankind, Man
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Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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Marriage
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A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
-John Steinbeck
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Mind, the
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Texas is not a state -- it's a state of mind.
-John Steinbeck
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People
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There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don't mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that's the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.
-John Steinbeck
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Photography
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I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.
-John Steinbeck
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Pollution
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The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.
-John Steinbeck
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Books by and about John Steinbeck