Quotes from James A. Michener

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

Writers turn dreams into print.

The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.

A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.

For this is the journey that men make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much what else they find.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.

We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.

When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I'm going to live as if I were a great man.

I wish I could tell you about the South Pacific. The way it actually was. The endless ocean. The infinite specks of coral we called islands. Coconut palms nodding gracefully toward the ocean. Reefs upon which waves broke into spray, and inner lagoons, lovely beyond description. I wish I could tell you about the sweating jungle, the full moon rising behind the volcanoes, and the waiting. The waiting. The timeless, repetitive waiting.

The dead are dead but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.

No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.

Only the rocks live forever, Gray Wolf said.

I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.

This is not a promise, this is not threat, it's just the way it's gonna be!!!

It was his opinion that a man had to wait until he was dead to know the meaning of God, unless he happened to have known the sea in his youth.

A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.