Top 100 Michener Quotes
#1. I can't remember who said it - I think it was Allan Gurganus when he was visiting the Michener Center - but he told us to "spend [our] gold," meaning, put everything you have into a story. Other "gold" will be waiting for you for your next project.
Mary J. Miller
#2. Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of National Geographics, is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.
Wilfrid Sheed
#3. When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.
Jeff Kinney
#4. Rice Krispies happens to be one of my favorite junk foods, just as I regard Michener as superior among junk writers.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#5. When I first went to kindergarten kids asked me what I was. I did not understand-I'm a person. They explained that I look a little different and it is not as easy to tell which color I am. -Janelle from Who I Am Not What I Am, Tara Michener
Tara Michener
#6. Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don't need you.
James A. Michener
#7. First buy a cowboy hat and boots. Then you're on your way to being a Texan.
James A. Michener
#8. 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
#9. 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. [The World Is My Home (1991)]
James A. Michener
#10. 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
#11. Any spot for which a man's forebears have bled and died will forever be his homeland.
James A. Michener
#12. 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.
James A. Michener
#13. We have won freedom, he brooded, but if we abuse it, or vote for cheap personal advantage, it won't be worth having. We are familiar with the abuses of kings, but because what we now attempt is new, we can't foresee its abuses. They'll come.
James A. Michener
#14. 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
#15. Never forget, son, when you represent Texas, always go first class.
James A. Michener
#16. Human affairs are not so happily arranged that the best things please the most men. It is the proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob.
James A. Michener
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. I don't always think of myself as ethnic ... my mom is Black, and my dad is White, and we like to call my race"Bi-racial". Everyone at camp is interesting because they just call me Black. -Mackenzie
Tara Michener
#21. When men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.
James A. Michener
#22. I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
James A. Michener
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Creative geniuses are a slap-happy lot. Treat Them with respect.
James A. Michener
#29. 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
#30. They were a group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.
James A. Michener
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. I do believe that everyone growing up faces differential opportunities. With me, it was books and travel and some good teachers.
James A. Michener
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. 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
#43. We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.
James A. Michener
#44. No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
James A. Michener
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. The extreme geniality of San Francisco's economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States.
James A. Michener
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#55. From the time that money began to be regarded with honor, the real value of things was forgotten.
James A. Michener
#56. I don't know anyone who remembers meeting their parents when they were a baby so i'm just like everybody else. -Zoey (100% Real)
Tara Michener
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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.
James A. Michener
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle.
James A. Michener
#66. I do wish you'd break the careless habit of using the word American as if you had stolen it from the rest of us. Use norteamericano, because we Cubans and Mexicans and Uruguayans, we're also Americans.
James A. Michener
#67. Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.
James A. Michener
#69. 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
#70. I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
James A. Michener
#71. The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.
James A. Michener
#72. 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
#73. A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.
James A. Michener
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa.
James A. Michener
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
James A. Michener
#82. Looking at my reflection tonight, I see a new girl staring back at me. She has big hair and big eyes and a big heart. Not only is she the perfect size and pretty ... she is smart. -Mackenzie
Tara Michener
#83. 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
#84. The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.
James A. Michener
#85. The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.
James A. Michener
#86. A writer can make a fortune in America, but he can't make a living.
James A. Michener
#87. 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
#88. I have only one bit of advice to beginning writers: be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
James A. Michener
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. My principal flowers will be trees. Because when you plant trees, you're entitled to believe you'll live forever. So
James A. Michener
#94. 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
#95. An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
James A. Michener
#96. On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.
James A. Michener
#97. 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
#98. America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
James A. Michener
#99. No idea is ever dead until those who believe in it say it's dead.
James A. Michener
#100. Self-abuse is shockingly common, especially among people who have been conditioned to believe that they are to blame when things go wrong.
Anna J. Michener
