Edna Ferber Quotes

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

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until 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!

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.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

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.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.

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

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.

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