Explore Quotes by James A. Michener

Rampaging horsemen can conquer; only the city can civilize.

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

The dead are dead but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

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.

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

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.

As a younger man I wrote for eight years without ever earning a nickel which is a long apprenticeship, but in that time I learned a lot about my trade.

You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.

When I was a child in the Navy during World War II, I was perennially grateful to the armed services libraries for having on hand a good supply of those pocket books, which were so common in that period. I must have read a couple hundred of them, and they did a lot to save my sanity.