
(1902–1968)
U.S. writerJournal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
more infomedium:
“The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.”
more infosource: Sweet Thursday (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), rev. edition, 120.
category: help, kindness, receive
medium: Fiction
“Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main this is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
more infosource: November 10, 1958 letter to Thom, his fourteen-year-old son, in Letters of a Nation, Andrew Carroll ed. (New York: Kodansha, 1997 ), 314.
category: advice, breakup, loss, love, school of life
medium: Letter
“I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
more infosource: Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Penguin, 1997), 17.
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category: alcohol, appetite, marriage, masculinity, passion
medium: Memoir
“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
more infosource: Sweet Thursday (New York: Penguin, 2008), 107.
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category: problem, resolution, sleep
medium: Fiction
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
more infosource: “Interview with a Best-Selling Author: John Steinbeck,” by Robert van Gelder in April 1947 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, 18, 123–25.
medium: magazine interview
“I’ve always tried out my material on my dogs first. You know, with Angel, he sits there and listens and I get the feeling he understands everything. But with Charley, I always felt he was just waiting to get a word in edgewise. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of Of Mice and Men, I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.”
more infosource: “The Art of Fiction No. 45,” The Paris Review, No. 63, Fall 1975
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medium: interview
“A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.”
more infosource: “In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, quoted in “Steinbeck,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (New York: The Viking Press, 1976), 182-83.
category: butter, flavor, odor, words, writer, writing
medium: nonfiction
“On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.”
more infosource: East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 5.
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category: beautiful description, California, cream, flower, lupin, poppy, rain, spring
medium: fiction
“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”
more infosource: East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 73.
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category: beautiful description, duration, eventlessness, memory, time
medium: fiction


John Steinbeck