Ernest Gaines Quotes
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Don't tell me to believe. Don't tell me to believe in the same God or laws that men believe in who commit these murders. Don't tell me to believe that God can bless this country and that men are judged by their peers. Who among his peers judged him? Was I there? Was the minister there? Was Harry Williams there? Was Farrell Jarreau? Was my aunt? Was Vivian? No, his peers did not judge him, and I will not believe.
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But let us say he was (guilty). Let us for a moment say he was (guilty). What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.
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All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.
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Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That's the only thing.
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I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.
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Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.
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I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.
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I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?
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We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?
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I was raised by a lady that was crippled all her life but she did everything for me and she raised me. She washed our clothes, cooked our food, she did everything for us. I don't think I ever heard her complain a day in her life. She taught me responsibility towards my brother and sisters and the community.
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The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.
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I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.
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I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.
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...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.
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I think I'm a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don't only believe in God, I know there's God.
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"You going back," she said. "You ain't going to run away from this, Grant."
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When I'm sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.
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Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.
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You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.
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Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.
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I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.
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There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.
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In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.
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How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?