James A. Michener Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

James A. Michener
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
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

James A. Michener
Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

James A. Michener
The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

James A. Michener
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

James A. Michener
At NACA [fictional space agency] we solve everything eventually. That's our job, and now it's yours.... At NACA... there are no insoluble problems. Only timeconsuming ones.

James A. Michener
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

James A. Michener
Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.

James A. Michener
Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, do not come to these islands empty-handed, or craven in spirit, or afraid to starve. There is no food here. In these islands there is no certainty. Bring your own food, your own gods, your own flowers and fruits and concepts. For if you come without resources to these islands you will perish... On these harsh terms the islands waited.

James A. Michener
The Luna broke away to start its descent to what Tucker Thompson had told his readers was "the dark and dangerous chasm in which unknown forces threaten the life of any trespasser." Dr. Mott, reading the report in Folks, growled, "The basic forces are identical with those which govern Brooklyn. Only the landscape is different."

James A. Michener
These are the highlights in a lifetime of following sports. Hilarity. The most sheer fun I ever had in sports was playing volleyball, a game I commend highly... if you have ever seen the great women s teams of Japan and Russia or the equally good men's teams of Cuba and East Germany, you know how exciting this playground game, which requires so little equipment, can be.

James A. Michener
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
I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.

James A. Michener
When men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.

James A. Michener
Never forget, son, when you represent Texas, always go first class.

James A. Michener
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
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
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
... 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
The crucial Battle of Zamość, which is not stressed in most current histories because it involved a Polish-Russian battle in which the Poles won.

James A. Michener
I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?

James A. Michener
Silence, much more powerful than before, much more shot through with the meaning of life and the accumulated wisdom of history.

James A. Michener
[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
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
He had obtained a clearer view of his homeland by leaving it and seeing it through the eyes of others.

James A. Michener
I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

James A. Michener
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
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
I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind.

James A. Michener