187 quotes
In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much.
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
Beans are a roof over your stomach. Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold.
Tortilla Flat (1935)
The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start.
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
"It is so easy a thing to give—only great men have the courage and courtesy and, yes, the generosity to receive."
Burning Bright (1950)
Ain't many guys travel around together. I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
Of Mice and Men (1937)
This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.
The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it.
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.
Writers at Work (1977)
Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.
Sweet Thursday (1954)
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple of them and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
I believe that the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial.
Journal of a Novel (1969)
Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires.
Radio interview (1939)
Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.
Of Mice and Men (1937)