Top 100 James A. Michener Quotes
#1. Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don't need you.
James A. Michener
#2. First buy a cowboy hat and boots. Then you're on your way to being a Texan.
James A. Michener
#3. 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.
James A. Michener
#4. Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.
James A. Michener
#5. With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world has been my home.
James A. Michener
#6. Never forget, son, when you represent Texas, always go first class.
James A. Michener
#7. Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.
James A. Michener
#9. I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener
#10. I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
James A. Michener
#11. I live for the few minutes I can talk with a sensible human being, but every time I do, I feel worse than before.
James A. Michener
#12. Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.
James A. Michener
#13. Wherever a human being goes, there is a challenge. Be the best man you can, and your gods will look with favor upon you.
James A. Michener
#14. Creative geniuses are a slap-happy lot. Treat Them with respect.
James A. Michener
#16. You don't fight to protect warships or old men. Like the book says, you fight to save your civilization. And so often it seems that civilization is composed mainly of the things women and children want.
James A. Michener
#17. They were a group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.
James A. Michener
#18. I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.
James A. Michener
#20. At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.
James A. Michener
#21. I do believe that everyone growing up faces differential opportunities. With me, it was books and travel and some good teachers.
James A. Michener
#22. In a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Washington, Peking and especially Moscow.
James A. Michener
#23. It was his opinion that a man had to wait until he was dead to know the meaning of God, unless he happened to have known the sea in his youth.
James A. Michener
#25. I think the bottom line is that if you get through a childhood like mine, it's not at all bad. Obviously, you come out a pretty tough turkey, and you have had all the inoculations you need to keep you on a level keel for the rest of your life. The sad part is, most of us don't come out.
James A. Michener
#26. I doubt, dearest child, that you could ever marry a Frenchman. They're not dependable. I've never believed that they're serious Catholics." He
James A. Michener
#28. 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.
James A. Michener
#30. We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.
James A. Michener
#31. No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
James A. Michener
#32. The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east
James A. Michener
#33. A lot of nonsense is spoken about work. Some of the finest men I've known were the laziest. Never work because it's expected of you. Find out how much work you must do to live and be happy. Don't do any more.
James A. Michener
#35. The city of Los Angeles is now some twenty-four hundred miles south of central Alaska, and since it is moving slowly northward as the San Andreas fault slides irresistibly along, the city is destined eventually to become part of Alaska. If
James A. Michener
#36. 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.
James A. Michener
#37. When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I'm going to live as if I were a great man.
James A. Michener
#40. From the time that money began to be regarded with honor, the real value of things was forgotten.
James A. Michener
#41. Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door
James A. Michener
#42. If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.
James A. Michener
#43. Afghanistan, one of the most inconspicuous nations on earth. In 1946 it was just emerging from the bronze age, a land incredibly old, incredibly tied to an ancient past. At the embassy we used to say, Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus.
James A. Michener
#44. Maybe books are best, because you don't have to have money to read... A man can travel all over the world and come back the same kind of fool he was when he started. You can't do that with books.
James A. Michener
#45. To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne.
James A. Michener
#46. For this is the journey that men make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find.
James A. Michener
#47. You love the Hawaiians as potential Christians, but you despise them as people. I am proud to say that I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion, and it is therefore appropriate that I should be expelled from a mission where love is not.
James A. Michener
#48. The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle.
James A. Michener
#49. Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.
James A. Michener
#50. 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.
James A. Michener
#51. 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.
James A. Michener
#52. A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.
James A. Michener
#53. No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before.
James A. Michener
#54. About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America.
James A. Michener
#55. It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great good things of sound and sight and smell.
James A. Michener
#56. I was born to a woman I never knew and raised by another who took in orphans. I do not know my background, my lineage, my biological or cultural heritage. But when I meet someone new, I treat them with respect ... For after all, they could be my people.
James A. Michener
#57. I've spent my life trying to be better than I was, and I am a brother to all who share the same aspiration.
James A. Michener
#58. I was once asked if I'd like to meet the president of a certain country. I said, "No, but I'd love to meet some sheepherders." The sheepherders, farmers and taxi drivers are often the most interesting people.
James A. Michener
#59. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
James A. Michener
#60. The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.
James A. Michener
#61. The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.
James A. Michener
#62. During my lifetime I have met dozens of writers and photographers in dozens of different countries. But I have encountered no one who could both write and photograph with the artistry of Robert Vavra.
James A. Michener
#64. At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff.
James A. Michener
#65. 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.
James A. Michener
#66. My principal flowers will be trees. Because when you plant trees, you're entitled to believe you'll live forever. So
James A. Michener
#67. 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.
James A. Michener
#68. For of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do.
James A. Michener
#69. America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
James A. Michener
#70. No idea is ever dead until those who believe in it say it's dead.
James A. Michener
#71. [The church's] job is to provide permanent solace and spiritual leadership to the people as a whole, whatever their government at the moment, so long as it stays within the bounds of moral decency.
James A. Michener
#72. The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
James A. Michener
#74. Chesapeake Bay is like a beautiful woman. There's no humiliation from which she cannot recover.
James A. Michener
#76. You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.
James A. Michener
#77. That's the world that matters. The world where people glitter like diamonds with a million facets. Where people are like pearls, luminous as nacre on the surface but each with a speck that would destroy it if you were looking only for specks.
James A. Michener
#79. If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
James A. Michener
#80. Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don't portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope.
James A. Michener
#81. This is not a promise, this is not threat, it's just the way it's gonna be!!!
James A. Michener
#82. It heartens me to think of Verdi who composed thundering operas in his eighties; Michelangelo who did fine work in his ninetieth year, and Titian, who painted better than ever in his one hundredth.
James A. Michener
#86. But the new priest in town, this Father Ybarra, who had come north to see if the missions should be closed down, absolutely forbade her to step foot inside Santa Teresa: "This place is not for women. If God had intended you to enter these precincts, he would have made women friars.
James A. Michener
#87. The chance emergence of the was nothing. Remember this. But its persistence and patient accumulation of stature were everything. Only by relentless effort did it establish its right to exist.
James A. Michener
#88. The criminals at the North make us sell our wheat and cotton to Europe at cheap prices, but will not permit us to buy our manufactures cheaply from England. No, they pass a high tariff, keep out cheap European products and force us to buy from Massachusetts and New York at extremely high prices.
James A. Michener
#89. I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.
James A. Michener
#90. A soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.
James A. Michener
#92. It really set my nerves jangling," Jenny Larsen confessed. "Wasn't it strange, the way it kept up, day after day?" Alice Grebe, to whom this question was directed, said nothing, for
James A. Michener
#93. If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.
James A. Michener
#94. There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America, and whether we with it or not, from now on there will be immense traffic along that highway.
James A. Michener
#95. 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.
James A. Michener
#96. When I was a child in the Navy during World War II, I was perennially grateful to the armed services libraries for having on hand a good supply of those pocket books, which were so common in that period. I must have read a couple hundred of them, and they did a lot to save my sanity.
James A. Michener
#97. I had been educated with free scholarships. I went to nine different universities, always at public expense, and when you have that experience, you are almost obligated to give it back. It's as simple as that.
James A. Michener
#98. [Very rich people] with brains make a great effort to hold on to every penny they have while preaching to the general population that freedom and dignity and patriotism are possible only under their protection; in this way they elicit the support of the very people they hold in subjection.
James A. Michener
#99. What did I learn in my travels? In whatever foreign country I visited I met dreamers who longed to reach America and its promise of an enriched life so I knew we had a country rich in opportunity, but I also met those brilliant Jews already in America who had been denied that promise.
James A. Michener
#100. As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.
James A. Michener
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