John Steinbeck Quotes

God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.

On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

I had a student once come up to me and we were talking about this incident, and, of course, I never had the right thing to say. But later on, I realized I should have said: Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

I'd be the first person to say I can't write dialogue. My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward. I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic.

The important question has nothing to do with whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in your ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk.

I think that's, it's my way of writing, it's my, it's part of you know for lack of a better word, God-given talent that I have that I'm really good at that kind of dialogue.

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

Things don't always turn out exactly the way you want them to be and you feel disappointed. You are not always going to be the winner. That's when you have to stop and figure out why things happened the way they did and what you can do to change them.

I want to study, to write to live and have a good time.

I don't want to write my life. I live my life. I want to make up a new world.

It's so much easier to make a movie about someone who is so likeable that you just want to get out of the way.

Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.

I'm not going to tell people how to live their life and I surely wouldn't tell people my life is the way you should be living. People get to choose what they do want to do with their life and I appreciated that.

Screenwriting is not an artform, it is a punishment from God.

Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.

The nation which can only be saved by one man and wants to be saved that way deserves a whipping!

When you're a writer, you want to try to avoid cliches. Unfortunately, when you're writing about marriage or family, all cliches seem to apply.

She’s not for you, nor you for her; at least, not in the way you both want.

I don’t want to do what my idols did… I want to do more than they did. And I feel like I’m on my way.

the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person.