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
It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature.
Not only do the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.
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.
The basic rule [of writing] given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.
The cars of the migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West.... And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a mysterious new place, ... a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.
Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.
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.
The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little ‘why’.
It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another-but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.
If you are in love-that's a good thing-that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone.
Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.
Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.
A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.
A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man: