"You can't avoid dealing with moral matters, because that's what life is about. But I think it is wrong when somebody like Steinbeck crusades in his fiction. That's why Steinbeck bores me so. The real crusader doesn't need to crusade; he writes about human beings in the sense Chekhov did. He tries to see a human being whole with all his wrong-headedness and all his right-headedness. To blind yourself to one thing for the sake of your prejudice is limiting. I think it is a mistake. There's so much room in the world for crusading, but it is for the editorial writer, the speech-maker, the politician, and the man in public life to do, not for the writer of fiction."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck