James A. Michener Quotes

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.

You have to be eligible for luck to strike, and I think that's a matter of education and preparation, and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.

We are never prepared for what we expect.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.

A poet sees things in two ways: First, as a child who never saw it before, and Second, as a dying man who will never see it again.

The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.

There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.

Writers turn dreams into print.

No idea is ever dead until those who believe in it say it's dead.

I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.

Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.

The extreme geniality of San Francisco's economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States.

...when men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.

Creative geniuses are a slap-happy lot. Treat Them with respect.

The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.

Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.

Every animal that walks the earth, or swims, or flies is precious beyond description, something so rare and wonderful that it equals the stars or the ocean or the mind of man.

I've spent my life trying to be better than I was, and I am a brother to all who share the same aspiration.

The dead are dead but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.

As a younger man I wrote for eight years without ever earning a nickel which is a long apprenticeship, but in that time I learned a lot about my trade.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

I think young people ought to seek the experience that is going to knock them off center.

I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.

The decent thing to do is to get rid of some of this money.

I was surprised when shortly after New Year's Day of 1983, the Governor of Texas summoned me to his office, because I hadn't been aware that he knew I was in town.

If a young aspirant had a modicum of skill and a busy typewriter she or he would sooner or later get a foothold in one of the magazines and a leaping start on the ladder upward.

organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.

First buy a cowboy hat and boots. Then you're on your way to being a Texan.