John Steinbeck

"Any writer is a fool who tries to write for a person."

"The responsibility is upon us for our acts and for our daily thoughts."

"I never look at the eyes. If you look at the eyes, it ruins the whole effect."

"Every man has the right to have his hunger satisfied."

"The death of any man diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

"There's something in humans that wants to be better than they are."

"The truth is like a lion; you don't have to defend it. Let it loose."

"Character is a composite of attributes that define how we choose to live."

"I have never written a book about my life, because I was too busy living it."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence is an act of rebellion."

"It seems to me that a man who has not died in his lifetime is not fully alive."

"We cannot learn wisdom from the past; we can only learn to tolerate it."

"I have become tired of following people who insist on moving the goal line every time I come close."

"It would be good if people would listen more than they speak."

"The feeling that any book gives to the reader is the true test of literature."

"We belong to the whole, and we only exist in the whole."

"A man is dead when he stops dreaming."

"The most sensible people are sensible about admitting their lack of sense."

"The future is like heaven, everybody exalts it but nobody wants to go there now."

"Perhaps this is the greatest gift from my ancestors: the ability to wonder and to question."

"No one really wants to forbid something unless it is popular."

"I love the monster of the sea, that is Moby Dick, but I hate the whale that would destroy me."

"The workings of the human mind are quite mysterious, but once again I must say that we do not understand them."

"I sit at my typewriter and I only know the people that I am writing about at that moment."

"It seems to me that if you wish to hold someone, you must hold them with all your might."

"The only hope is to learn tolerance and compassion for all that lives."

"I don't think I was made for these times."

"The poverty of the present time is not the poverty of the poor, but the poverty of the rich."

"Each person is a universe, and you can never know what forces are at work within them."

"The best human beings I have ever known are those who have been brought up by the strongest principles."