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.

Whenever I start a book, I swear it's going to be a short one. But then it's, 'Who was his grandfather? And how did he get there in the first place? And what kind of animals is he chasing?'

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.

Every animal that walks the earth, or swims, or flies is precious beyond description, something so rare and wonderful that it equals the stars or the ocean or the mind of man.

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

I missed a whole cycle of childhood, but I've never used it as a device for self-pity.

Whatever I did, there was always someone around who was better qualified. They just didn't bother to do it.

America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.

For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.

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

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

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.

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.