Edna Ferber Quotes

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.

Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?

If men ever discovered how tough women actually are, they would be scared to death.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

A closed mind is a dying mind.

Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrees, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things a la though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe and sane, and sure.

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.

The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whisky. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.

It's terrible to realize that you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die; and, then it's too late.

America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.

There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind's wheat and the other kind's emeralds.

I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.

There are ... just two kinds of girls. Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don't.

... home isn't always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody or something needs you.

There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge -- this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.

If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love - or tries to.

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.