James A. Michener Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
I don't know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss, but you live with that loss.

James A. Michener
Creative geniuses are a slap-happy lot. Treat Them with respect.

James A. Michener
Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly.

James A. Michener
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

James A. Michener
I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.

James A. Michener
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
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
Leonid Brezhnev needed a haircut, so he went down to the ground floor of the Kremlin and plopped into the chair. It was understood that at such times the barber was to say not a word, just cut hair. But this morning, after a few snips he said: "Comrade Brezhnev what are you going to do about Poland?" No reply. Some minutes later: "Comrade Brezhnev, what about Poland?" Again no reply. Then, pretty soon: "Comrade Brezhnev, you've got to do something about Poland." At this Brezhnev jumps out of the chair and tears away the cloth: "What's all this about Poland?" and the barber says: "It makes my job so much easier," and Brezhnev screams: "What do you mean?" and the barber says: "Every time I mention Poland your hair stands straight up on end."

James A. Michener
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
No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure. But having failed in one location and having been ejected, it is possible that in the next he will be a little wiser.

James A. Michener
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
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.

James A. Michener
The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

James A. Michener
The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.

James A. Michener
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
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
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
Not too many people work in a job where, waiting out there are three or four hundred people who are paid to tear apart what you've done. And often they are brighter than you are, or they know more about the subject than you do, or they wish they had written a book themselves, or done a lot better. Or they just don't like it! And you have to live with it. I have been very well treated by the critics in the long haul.

James A. Michener
Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others… a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as Pacific.

James A. Michener
On Tuesday the freighter steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar and for five days plowed eastward through the Mediterranean, past islands and peninsulas rich in history, so that on Saturday night the steward advised Dr. Cullinane, "If you wish an early sight of the Holy Land you must be up at dawn."

James A. Michener
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
A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.

James A. Michener
Look, son, if you calculate on getting me drunk and outsmarting me, quit now, because you simply can't do it.

James A. Michener
A Pole is a man born with a sword in his right hand, a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to rebuild.

James A. Michener
On a bleak wintry morning some years ago I was summoned to the office of our naval attache at the American embassy in Kabul.

James A. Michener