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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The way that I work is very specific, very thorough, and the process has to be totally clear.
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It is only when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead ofthings kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins.
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I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart. Hope is the feeling that life and work have a meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you. Life without hope is an empty, boring, and useless life. I cannot imagine that I could strive for something if I did not carry hope in me. I am thankful to God for this gift. It is as big as life itself.
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I'm real connected with Australia, you heard? I gotta come up there, man.
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Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name. … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
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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.
