James A. Michener Quotes
-
No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
-
Look, son, if you calculate on getting me drunk and outsmarting me, quit now, because you simply can't do it.
-
On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years.
-
I was surprised when shortly after New Year's Day of 1983, the Governor of Texas summoned me to his office, because I hadn't been aware that he knew I was in town.
-
Very early on in life, I decided the hell with it: material things weren't for me. Christmas would come, and other kids would have all these presents, and it wouldn't bother me a bit.
-
About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America.
-
There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.
-
Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don't portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope.
-
I missed a whole cycle of childhood, but I've never used it as a device for self-pity.
-
Youth is truth.
-
A person on dialysis undergoes very heavy and irritating treatment, and in time, it seems more than you can bear.
-
I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.
-
They were a group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men.
-
You love the Hawaiians as potential Christians, but you despise them as people. I am proud to say that I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion, and it is therefore appropriate that I should be expelled from a mission where love is not.
-
I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.
-
Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.
-
...organizations like the church or General Motors promote a man up and up until he reaches a spot which he is obviously incapable of filling, and there they lay him to rest.
-
I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind.