Top 45 Ernest Gaines Quotes
#1. But let us say he was (guilty). Let us for a moment say he was (guilty). What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.
Ernest Gaines
#2. Grace under pressure isn't just about bullfighters and men at war. It's about getting up every day to face a job or a white boss you don't like but have to face to feed your children so they'll grow up to be a better generation.
Ernest Gaines
#3. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#4. Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn't like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.
Ernest Gaines
#5. In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from.
Ernest Gaines
#6. You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.
Ernest Gaines
#7. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#8. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#9. I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.
Ernest Gaines
#10. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#11. The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.
Ernest Gaines
#12. I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.
Ernest Gaines
#13. I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
Ernest Gaines
#14. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#16. All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.
Ernest Gaines
#17. How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?
Ernest Gaines
#18. The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.
Ernest Gaines
#19. I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.
Ernest Gaines
#20. He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.
Ernest Gaines
#21. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.
Ernest Gaines
#22. "You going back," she said. "You ain't going to run away from this, Grant."
Ernest Gaines
#23. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#24. We looked at each other, and I could see in those big reddened eyes that he was not going to scream. He was full of anger - and who could blame him? - but he was no fool. He needed me, and he wanted me here, if only to insult me.
Ernest Gaines
#25. We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?
Ernest Gaines
#26. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#27. I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.
Ernest Gaines
#28. I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?
Ernest Gaines
#29. Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?
Ernest Gaines
#30. Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.
Ernest Gaines
#31. Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.
Ernest Gaines
#32. 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
Ernest Gaines
#33. Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he's the One.
Ernest Gaines
#34. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#35. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#36. Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.
Ernest Gaines
#37. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#38. I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.
Ernest Gaines
#39. 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.
Ernest Gaines
#40. There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.
Ernest Gaines
#41. What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.
Ernest Gaines
#42. Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.
Ernest Gaines
#43. Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That's the only thing.
Ernest Gaines
#44. And that's all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we - each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better.
Ernest Gaines
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