James A. Michener Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I was in a military family, so by the time I was 13 I'd lived in six different places.
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I used to shop in ASDA all the time. Every now and then I still go in to get a little salad for lunch.
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I retire every time I'm done with a movie. Then I go back. You know, I enjoy sleep. But I love to work; it's fun for me. As long as it continues to be fun, and I'm tolerated by the people around me, I will do it.
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I'm not anti-middle-class in the slightest. Look at me! I am very pro people putting time and money and effort into trying to improve the world.
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When I first met Mandela, we did not discuss anything of substance; we just felt each other out. He spent a long time expressing his admiration for the Boer generals and how ingenious they were during the Anglo-Boer war.
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I thought I knew there was a God. I always acknowledged that, but at the same time, I didn't live by those laws.
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I had traveled 10 states and played over 50 cities by the time I was 4.
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Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age.
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.
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What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
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A lot of the television industry is so cookie-cutter. In general, there are so many shows that are easy and bland to watch. You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it's pretty much the same every week.
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I sometimes feel it is to my disadvantage that I have not conducted the Cleveland Orchestra or the Boston or Chicago symphonies, but then I have had to sacrifice something in order to have enough time with my orchestras.
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I meet an enormous number of incredible people all the time, people I find very inspiring, and I'm very busy.
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Listen, a lot of religions have fundamentalists.
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The 1970s 'Wonder Woman' was sort of a kitsch thing. It was a very specific time for that, and it's hard to modernize something like that.
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I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent, and I'm not your mommy; I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
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Overall when you work in fashion, you're always in a rush. You're always a little late, always in a hurry. Every single moment's important, so you never have enough time to do what you want to do. It's ridiculous.
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I think the prom is very serious also. It's an American ritual, it's a rite of passage, and it's very much a part of this country.
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I could play, scored a goal; I showed that I can play in Europe, in England. Because many say that England is very difficult.
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Until now I have never really lived! Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business. It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements. There is an exquisite smoothness of motion and the joy of gliding through space. It is wonderful!
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After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.
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There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.
