Top 100 Ferber's Quotes
#1. [On Edna Ferber's Ice Palace] ... the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.
Dorothy Parker
#2. Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.
Edna Ferber
#3. Writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.
Edna Ferber
#4. It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.
Edna Ferber
#5. I'm not much to look at", replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful inside.
Edna Ferber
#6. The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.
Edna Ferber
#7. About mistakes it's funny. You got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs they get mad.
Edna Ferber
#8. Now gae your wa'sTho'anes as gude As ever happit flesh and blude, Yet part we maunthe case sae hard is, Amang the writers and the bardies That lang they'll brook the auld I trow, Or neibours cry,'Weel brook the new'.
Edna Ferber
#9. What could be more exciting! As long as you're fascinated and as long as you keep on fighting the things you think are wrong, you're living. It isn't the evil people in the world who do the most harm. It's the sweet do-nothings that can destroy us.
Edna Ferber
#10. The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.
Edna Ferber
#11. I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.
Edna Ferber
#12. There are two ways of doing battle against Disgrace. You may live it down; or you may run away from it and hide. The first method is heart-breaking, but sure. The second cannot be relied upon because of the uncomfortable way Disgrace has of turning up at your heels.
Edna Ferber
#13. People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.
Edna Ferber
#14. A closed country is a dying country... A closed mind is a dying mind.' from a radio broadcast in 1947
Edna Ferber
#15. Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously made.
-The Gay Old Dog
Edna Ferber
#17. The astronomers tell us that other planets are gifted with two - four - even nine lavish moons. Imagine the romantic possibilities of nine moons.
Edna Ferber
#18. Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love - or tries to.
Edna Ferber
#19. Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
Edna Ferber
#20. It's terrible to realize you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die, and then it's too late.
Edna Ferber
#21. Imported actors, like certain wines, sometimes do not stand the ocean trip. This can be as true of American actors in Europe as it is of European actors in America.
Edna Ferber
#22. We no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth-we build them for the warmth of the soul; we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.
Edna Ferber
#23. Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.
Edna Ferber
#24. A woman can look both moral and exciting ... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.
Edna Ferber
#25. Cherry cobbler is shortcake with a soul.
Edna Ferber
#26. Here in Texas maybe we've got into the habit of confusing bigness with greatness.
Edna Ferber
#27. A life like this develops the comedy sense. You can't play tragedy while you're living it.
Edna Ferber
#28. If it's freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.
Edna Ferber
#29. I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.
Edna Ferber
#30. There are people who have a penchant for cities-more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulsebeats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.
Edna Ferber
#31. [Women] ... is nothin' but little girls in long skirts, and their hair done up.
Edna Ferber
#32. It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.
Edna Ferber
#33. Spring ... made fair false promises which summer was called upon to keep.
Edna Ferber
#34. Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Edna Ferber
#35. He sat looking down at his hands
his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably he thought of another pair of hands
his mother's
with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken
expressive
her life written on them. Scars. She had them.
Edna Ferber
#36. The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness.
Edna Ferber
#37. Roast beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.
Edna Ferber
#38. Christmas is not a season. It is a feeling.
Edna Ferber
#39. I sometimes wonder ... if the land is not destroying the people who inhabit it as the people who inhabit it are destroying the land. A magic continent, a Peculiar Treasure, stuffed with riches, millions in it are starving in the midst of plenty.
Edna Ferber
#40. I'm tired of hearing you men say that this and that and the other isn't woman's work. Any work is woman's work that a woman can do well.
Edna Ferber
#41. Nicknames are fond names. We do not give them to people we dislike.
Edna Ferber
#42. Take Texas the way Texas takes bourbon. Straight. It goes down easier.
Edna Ferber
#43. I never go to weddings. Waste of time. Person can get married a dozen times. Lots of folks do. Family like ours, know everybody in the state of Texas and around outside, why, you could spend your life going to weddings. But a funeral, that's different. You only die once.
Edna Ferber
#44. But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.
Edna Ferber
#45. A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.
Edna Ferber
#46. I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.
Edna Ferber
#47. But almost any place is Baghdad if you don't know what will happen in it.
Edna Ferber
#49. A whole roomful of Jews is like a charged battery. The vitality sparks seem to fly, and frequently the result is a short circuit.
Edna Ferber
#50. Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.
Edna Ferber
#51. Where Chicago's vast and growing Negro population shifted and moved and stretched its great limbs ominously, reaching out and out in protest and overflowing the bounds that irked it. Her serene face and her quiet manner, her bland interest and friendly look protected her.
Edna Ferber
#52. Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.
Edna Ferber
#53. I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.
Edna Ferber
#54. Your idea of bliss is to wake up on a Monday morning knowing you haven't a single engagement for the entire week. You are cradled in a white paper cocoon tied up with typewriter ribbon.
Edna Ferber
#55. And in the stillness of the room you heard the roar and howl and crash of the great river whose flood had caught them land shaken them and brought Magnolia Ravenal to bed ahead of her time.
Edna Ferber
#56. Celebratin' New Year's Eve is like eatin' oranges. You got to let go your dignity t' really enjoy 'em.
Edna Ferber
#57. Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage. Did you know that, Julie? One doesn't despise them as food, knowing that.
Edna Ferber
#58. Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.
Edna Ferber
#59. On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.
Dorothy Parker
#60. Any garment which is cut to fit you is much more becoming, even if it is not so splendid as a garment which has been cut to fit somebody not of your stature.
Edna Ferber
#61. You can run, but what are you running from? Your life? You can't run away from your life.
Edna Ferber
#62. Does one eat peanuts at a ball game?' 'It ain't hardly legal if you don't.
Edna Ferber
#63. The very rich and the very social are, often, the very stuffy.
Edna Ferber
#64. The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whisky. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.
Edna Ferber
#65. It was part of theTexas ritual? We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.
Edna Ferber
#66. If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.
Edna Ferber
#67. A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.
Edna Ferber
#68. Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
Edna Ferber
#70. Writing, to be memorable, must be done in a state of impassioned serenity.
Edna Ferber
#71. Texas history is a varied, tempestuous, and vast as the state itself. Texas yesterday is unbelievable, but no more incredible than Texas today. Today's Texas is exhilarating, exasperating, violent, charming, horrible, delightful, alive.
Edna Ferber
#72. Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.
Edna Ferber
#73. It's been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, "that when a firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means she's worth six times as much.
Edna Ferber
#74. Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated ... , and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character, Selina said.
Edna Ferber
#75. All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.
Edna Ferber
#76. Emma McChesney was engaged in that nerve-wracking process known as getting things out of the way. When Emma McChesney aimed to get things out of the way she did not use a shovel; she used a road-drag.
Edna Ferber
#77. Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
Edna Ferber
#78. A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.
Edna Ferber
#80. I suppose it is a gift, being young, but it isn't special. We've all got it, early in life.
Edna Ferber
#81. No woman ought to pretend she's intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn't.
Edna Ferber
#82. There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.
Edna Ferber
#83. Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
Edna Ferber
#84. Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.
Edna Ferber
#85. The goat's business is none of the sheep's concern.
Edna Ferber
#86. In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.
Edna Ferber
#87. It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.
Edna Ferber
#88. You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.
Edna Ferber
#89. Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?
Edna Ferber
#91. That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.
Edna Ferber
#92. Science had married the wilderness and was taming the savage shrew.
Edna Ferber
#93. I don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.
Edna Ferber
#94. If men ever discovered how tough women actually are, they would be scared to death.
Edna Ferber
#95. The leading lady had a large and saving sense of humor. But there is nothing that blunts the sense of humor more quickly than a few months of one-night stands. Even O. Henry could have seen nothing funny about that room.
Edna Ferber
#97. Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.
Edna Ferber
#98. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.
Edna Ferber
#99. No one in the United States has the right to own millions of acres of American land, I don't care how they came by it.
Edna Ferber
#100. Housework's the hardest work in the world. That's why men won't do it.
Edna Ferber
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