Edna Ferber Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.

Edna Ferber
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
Science had married the wilderness and was taming the savage shrew.

Edna Ferber
She mistook his stolidness for depth, and it was a long time before she realized that his silence was not due to the weight of his thoughts but to the fact that he had nothing to say.

Edna Ferber
Life really can't ever utterly defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death; fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous constant.

Edna Ferber
America—rather, the United States—seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures.

Edna Ferber
Young folks don't want you to understand 'em. You've got no more right to understand them than you have to play their games or wear their clothes. They belong to themselves.

Edna Ferber
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
The ideal view for daily writing, hour on hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

Edna Ferber
I think that in order to write really well and convincingly one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, indignation, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice, are perhaps corrosive to the container but they make fine fuel.

Edna Ferber
About mistakes it's funny. You've got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs, they get mad.

Edna Ferber
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
Tulsa, oil capital of the world, as it calls itself, is a tough, get-rich-quick, heady town about as sensitive as corduroy.

Edna Ferber
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
But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.

Edna Ferber
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 by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character... A good deal like human beings.

Edna Ferber
I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.

Edna Ferber
She was more than a merely good cook; she was an alchemist in food stuffs.

Edna Ferber
People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.

Edna Ferber
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
It is a curious fact that people permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse — not yet missed and now too late — in his hand.

Edna Ferber
'Does one eat peanuts at a ball game?' 'It ain't hardly legal if you don't.'

Edna Ferber
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
His silences had not proceeded from the unplumbed depths of his knowledge. He merely had nothing to say.

Edna Ferber
So this was what life did to you, was it? Squeezed you dry, and then cast you aside in your old age, a pulp, a bit of discard. Well, they'd never catch her that way.

Edna Ferber
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
Writing, to be memorable, must be done in a state of impassioned serenity.

Edna Ferber
There is something I want to say to you. I've wanted to say it for years. World, I love you. I have always loved you … or almost always.

Edna Ferber
She never gave up hope of stiffening the spine of the invertebrate Hermie.

Edna Ferber
Celebratin' New Year's Eve is like eatin' oranges. You got to let go your dignity t' really enjoy 'em.

Edna Ferber