Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually dropping out for good in 1925, without a degree.įollowing Stanford, Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a freelance writer. In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford University - a decision that had more to do with pleasing his parents than anything else - but the budding writer would prove to have little use for college. I think I know better what I am doing than most writers but it still isn't much.” “Give a critic an inch and he'll write a play.” And it is also the best therapy because sometimes the troubles come tumbling out.” “The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.” “I learned long ago that you cannot tell how you will end by how you start.” “We work in our own darkness a great deal with little real knowledge of what we are doing.
Perhaps I am too lazy for anything else.” “For poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music. The crazy thing is that I get about the same number of words down either way.” “I guess it is a good thing I became a writer. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” “I know that no one really wants the benefit of anyone's experience, which is probably why it is so freely offered.” “I should think that a comfortable body would let the mind go freely to its gathering.” “I do a whole of a day's work and then the next day, flushed with triumph, I dawdle. He puts the last word down and it is done. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome.” “The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.” “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.” “To finish is sadness to a writer-a little death.
AUTHOR'S PURPOSE FOR WRITING THE PEARL JOHN STEINBECK HOW TO
You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” “We are lonesome animals.
We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip a trip takes us.” “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” “Ideas are like rabbits.
And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. “A journey is a person in itself no two are alike.