James A. Michener Quotes

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.

Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today because if you enjoy it today, you can do it again tomorrow.

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

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

I was born to a woman I never knew and raised by another who took in orphans. I do not know my background, my lineage, my biological or cultural heritage. But when I meet someone new, I treat them with respect.... For after all, they could be my people.

A poet sees things in two ways: First, as a child who never saw it before, and Second, as a dying man who will never see it again.

There are no insoluble problems. Only time-consuming ones.

We are never prepared for what we expect.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.

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

If a man happens to find himself, he has a mansion which he can inhabit with dignity all the days of his life.

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

It heartens me to think of Verdi who composed thundering operas in his eighties; Michelangelo who did fine work in his ninetieth year, and Titian, who painted better than ever in his one hundredth.

In six pages, I can't even say "Hello.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

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

Creative geniuses are a slap-happy lot. Treat Them with respect.

Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.

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

Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.

You have to be eligible for luck to strike, and I think that's a matter of education and preparation, and character and all the other solid attributes that sometimes people laugh at.

I think young people ought to seek the experience that is going to knock them off center.