Ernest Gaines Quotes
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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 learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.
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"What for?" I said. "What for, Tante Lou? He treated me the same way he treated her. He wants me to feel guilty, just as he wants her to feel guilty. Well, I'm not feeling guilty, Tante Lou. I didn't put him there. I do everything I know how to do to keep people like him from going there. He's not going to make me feel guilty."
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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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We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?
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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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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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He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.
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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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I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.
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You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.
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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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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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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 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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Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn't like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.
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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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...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.
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"You going back," she said. "You ain't going to run away from this, Grant."
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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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Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.
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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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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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How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?