James A. Michener Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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
In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, "But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled."

James A. Michener
Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

James A. Michener
For some time now they had been suspicious of him.

James A. Michener
In later years, it would become fashionable to say of the missionaries, "They came to the islands to do good, and they did right well." Others made jest of the missionary slogan, "They came to a nation in darkness; they left it in light," by pointing out: "Of course they left Hawaii lighter. They stole every goddamned thing that wasn't nailed down."

James A. Michener