James A. Michener Quotes

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

Very early on in life, I decided the hell with it: material things weren't for me. Christmas would c...

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhe...

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

Only the rocks live forever, Gray Wolf said.

All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.

You have to be eligible for luck to strike and I think that's a matter of education and preparation...

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better...

The South Pacific is memorable because when you are in the islands you simply cannot ignore nature. ...

Over a hundred German scientists arrived here [Huntsville] at eleven o’clock on an April morning and...

We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.

Because I am for them, Commander, because their ancestors stood up to that Nazi, Bligh, just like I ...

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might bette...

With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world ...

At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the re...

What did I learn in my travels? In whatever foreign country I visited I met dreamers who longed to r...

Writers turn dreams into print.

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire kn...

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life com...

I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every nob...

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

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent...

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writer...

It took her three seconds-one, two, three-to know that her destiny required her to join this man, an...

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, ...

For of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest an...

To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and fi...

a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible chang...

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

The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples a...

Other things being roughly equal, that man lives most keenly who lives in closest harmony with natur...

It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great...

It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.