Speaking about his view of his royal role, in the near future from September 2005
Source: [BBC NEWS UK 'I am who I am', http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4248234.stm, 2013-07-06, http://archive.today/DUpMy, 2013-07-06]
“I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.”
Source: "Sunisa Lee Says She's 'Going to Delete Twitter' So She Can Focus on Preparing for Beam Final" in People (1 August 2021) https://people.com/sports/tokyo-olympics-sunisa-lee-going-to-delete-twitter-focus-preparing-beam-final/
Paris Review Interview (1990)
Context: I know when it’s the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it’s the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, No. No, I’m finished. Bye. And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.
Quoted in "Teresa Heinz: A Woman On A Mission," Harry Stoffer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1993-11-07
Explanation on announcing she would not run for her late husband John Heinz's Senate seat.
Letter to Elizabeth Otis (1938), as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch, p. 37
Context: I must go over into the interior valleys. … There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads.
Do you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. … The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. … I'll do what I can. … Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.
“I'll do whatever I can, and leave the rest to God.”
