Explore Quotes by Edna Ferber

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

It's terrible to realize you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die, and then it's too late.

Roast beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.

If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.

Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.

A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.

Any garment which is cut to fit you is much more becoming, even if it is not so splendid as a garment which has been cut to fit somebody not of your stature.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.

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?

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.

It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.

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 warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.

If it's freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.

A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

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