Ernest Gaines Quotes

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.

I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.

I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.

Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That's the only thing.

Without love for my fellow man and respect for nature, to me, life is an obscenity.

Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

We all have much more in common than we have difference. I would say that about people all over the world. They don't know how much in common that they have

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.

You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.

Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.

I think I'm a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don't only believe in God, I know there's God.

He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.

A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth - and that's a myth.

I like the sound of people's voices, and I think what a man says can very well tell what he's thinking, whether he's lying or not.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he's the One.

If I were to give one piece of advice, I would say to never accept anything that you hear or see at face value. As a general rule of thumb, then the more you question, the better.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

When I'm sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.

The mark of fear is not easily removed.

I write with as much objectivity as I can.

"You going back," she said. "You ain't going to run away from this, Grant."

I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.

I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?

Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.

We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?

Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.