James A. Michener Quotes

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

Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them

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.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

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

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 was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.

All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.

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