The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
More Quotes from John Steinbeck:
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
Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
John Steinbeck
I have named the destroyers of nations comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction
John Steinbeck
A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
John Steinbeck
A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.
John Steinbeck
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
John Steinbeck
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Alistair Cooke
My knees are ticklish.
Juliana Hatfield
I prize the conditions under which I have lived because they have permitted me to choose my opportunities, to inquire into such matters as interested me, and to publish what I believed to be true, uncontrolled by any central authority.
Arthur Keith