Ernest Gaines Quotes

Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.

Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That's the only thing.

We all have much more in common than we have difference. I would say that about people all over the world. They don't know how much in common that they have

Without love for my fellow man and respect for nature, to me, life is an obscenity.

You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.

Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth - and that's a myth.

Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.

I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.

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.

The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.

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.

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.

How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?

And that's all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we - each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?

Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he's the One.