James A. Michener Quotes
The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.
Quotes to Explore
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I realize that things happen for a reason.
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What clients are really interested in is honesty, plus a baseline of competence.
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My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.
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The real debate is, when does life begin? When life begins, it deserves protection.
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I think it is more a cautiousness that protects me from enthusiasm about things. I tend not to get excited. People perceive it as a scowl, which is fair enough.
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Now I am not against widgets, those small third-party applications that people can put on their Web pages on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, in general.
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Comedy can be harder because if you aren't making the audience laugh, they're going to turn on you quicker. They'll go along with mediocre drama more than they'll go along with mediocre comedy.
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The Canadian franchises and Canada as a market for NHL hockey has always been a priority for us.
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Pushing the boundaries of polite society does not just fall under the purview of crime fiction authors.
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I'd like to imagine that in order to beat me a person would have to play almost perfect tennis.
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I don't believe that human beings are necessarily monogamous.
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As a general rule, when you comment on a blog, make it knowledgeable or witty and, most of all, relevant to that post - then, simply sign it with your name and your book title. Resist the urge to brag or sell your book.
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During my teenage years as an Islamist recruiter, I moved to live in self-contained communities in the London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets.
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I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.
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I played ping-pong with Prince. That's pretty surreal. He gave me a lesson before we played; like, he's great. He's a master at it, so I took the free lesson.
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Religion is absolutely unfathomable. Always and everywhere one can dig more deeply into infinities.
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There is something about building up a comradeship - that I still believe is the greatest of all feats - and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers. It's the intense effort, the giving of everything you've got. It's really a very pleasant sensation.
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Publishing for me is a business, not an ideology.
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I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.
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Life is too large to hang out a sign: 'For Men Only.'
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We are never more in danger than when we think ourselves most secure, nor in reality more secure than when we seem to be most in danger.
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I certainly believe that being in contact with one's spirit and nurturing one's spirit is as important as nurturing one's body and mind.
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I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive, and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry.
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The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.
