James A. Michener Quotes
Whatever I did, there was always someone around who was better qualified. They just didn't bother to do it.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm happy to sacrifice a big pay cheque for my happiness, if that's not too corny a thing to say. It's probably more naive than mature to say that, maybe, but that's how I feel.
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I had no intention of becoming a performer, and yet under miraculous circumstances I was brought into the music industry fold. If divine powers hadn't intervened, I'd still be living in China working in some area of Sino-American comparative law.
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I think that most people don't even know that I do other things. They think that Homer is all that I do.
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I've always worn earplugs, but I'm sure my hearing's not great.
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I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.
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How do you tell your mother that you feel you're getting... old? If I'm... old, then what is she?
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I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
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I do what I do. You like it, great. You don't, go listen to somebody else. I'm stickin' with the people who stuck with me.
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I often find it's just the confidence that makes you sexy, not what your body looks like. It's how you feel about yourself that makes you sexy.
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Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me it's a form of sacrament.
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I lived in New York until I was eleven years old, when my mother left my two older sisters and my father. My mother is 90 percent blind and deaf. She left and moved all the way to California. So I left my two older sisters and my father behind at the age of eleven and moved cross-country to take care of her.
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A good team, like a good show, comes into being when the separate individuals working together create, in essence, another separate higher entity - the team - the show - which is better than any of those individuals can ever be on their own.
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I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else.
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Question is, are you bozos smart enough to feel stupid?
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Everything you rejected and pushed aside-take it up again.
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There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.
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The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain't half full.
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The worst of misfortunes is still a stroke of luck, since one feels oneself living when one experiences it/
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This enterprise was doomed, but we do what we can and do what we must. So a young farmer with wife and children decides to go home. Good! He shows a sense that you and I will never understand. They will sing songs about us, but he will ensure that there are people to sing them. He plants. We destroy.
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The True Person benefits yet expects no reward, does the work and moves on. There is no desire to be considered better than others.
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The idea for any film is always going to be surprising or unusual.
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I was too restless as a boy to sit through an entire mass. It was akin to aversion training. I looked at it like a puppet show with a totally predictable story line. The only aspect I really liked was the music.
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Just do it until you figure out what you are doing. Then you do some more. Well, for myself I find that I need to do something again and again before I understand what it is that I am actually doing.
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Whatever I did, there was always someone around who was better qualified. They just didn't bother to do it.
