John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr.was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flatand Cannery Row, the multi-generation epic East of Eden, and the novellas Of Mice and Menand The Red Pony. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth27 February 1902
CountryUnited States of America
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.
I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.
I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.
Only through immitation do we develop toward originality.
Just set one day's work in front of the last day's work. That's the way it comes out. And that's the only way it does.
Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
There are places in this world where fable, myth, preconception, love, longing or prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high colored magical confusion takes permanent hold...Surely Texas is such a place...
Socialism never took root in America.
Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.
It requires self-esteem to receive-not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.
The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.
To a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself.
In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence, but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.