James A. Michener Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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My sense of religion is Einstein's sense of relativity. I don't believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.
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I don't want to come off like the jealous brother who wasn't getting the attention, but it was like no one was really into me anyway. I wasn't really a priority.
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The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous.
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Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault.
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Fashion offers no greater challenge than finding what works for night without looking like you are wearing a costume.
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What's surprised me most about the demands of blogging - the relentlessness of it. 24-hour news cycle, every media imaginable right here in New York, totally fair game.
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When I got out of high school, I started breaking out. I tried everything from A to Z as far as seeing doctors and getting prescriptions. I even did home remedies, and I had no luck. A fan gave me Proactiv, and it cleared my skin, but there were too many steps. I lose everything, and I lost one of the products. My acne started to come back.
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When I'm in Senegal, I can't just sit in isolation making music. People need my help. And the Senegalese people helped create my music. It comes from the country itself.
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Anybody I'm dating, I don't want them to talk about my music. I don't talk about my music to them.
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It used to be that watching a film was a very special occasion, the same way flying was. Before, if you took a flight from New York to L.A., most of the windows would be open. Now, we get on planes and we just close them because we're so used to what it feels like. I think the same thing has happened with cinema.
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This is Earth. Isn't it hot?
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We asked Jane Fonda if she would like to meet American pilots in Hanoi, but she refused, she didn't want to.
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As a kid, I always liked reading stories where I had a power-projection fantasy. I wanted to be inside of a story where I had power and influence, was going to rise to power, was going to somehow influence my society.
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For 'Hidalgo,' I just spent as much time around horses as I could, which made sense.
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Find joy and solace in the simple, and cultivate your utopia by feeling the Tao in every cubic inch of space.
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To me, 'rock star' conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know.
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In my humble opinion, change is stupid.
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And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.
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They had absolutely no sexual interest in me.
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'Imagine you are sucking the little fingers of a lady... or... no, you wouldn't understand that - since you'd never get that close to a lady - who'd want to get that close to you for God's sake?'
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As a woman, I'm expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very English thing. I don't design nice buildings - I don't like them. I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.
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I'm not sure if there is a cultural loss of innocence specifically associated with the seventies. The oil crisis? The Watergate scandal? I really don't know. There's nothing there on the scale of Hiroshima.
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Don't speak to me about your religion; first show it to me in how you treat other people. Don't tell me how much you love your God; show me in how much you love all God's children. Don't preach to me your passion for your faith; teach me through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I'm not as interested in what you have to tell or sell as I am in how you choose to live and give.
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Honest to God, I do all the research on these books myself.
