Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. - speech at

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Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species. - speech at

-- John Steinbeck

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No one wants advice – only corroboration.

-- John Steinbeck

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A man without words is a man without thought.

-- John Steinbeck

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Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breathed in peacefulness. Since both were shy they never talked about themselves. Neither knew about the other at all.

-- John Steinbeck

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Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

-- John Steinbeck

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