James A. Michener Quotes

This is not a promise, this is not threat, it's just the way it's gonna be!!!

A Pole is a man born with a sword in his right hand, a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to rebuild.

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.

The library of the future may very well be twofold: an underground repository for precious old books published prior to 1980 which no one sees or handles, plus a crisp reading disk to which chips from any library in the world are delivered electronically as you dial for them.

And he chose his subjects with great care: the South Pacific (Tales of the South Pacific, Return to Paradise), Judaism (The Source), South Africa (The Covenant), the West Indies (Caribbean), the American West (Centennial), the Chesapeake Bay (Chesapeake), Texas, Alaska, Spain (Iberia), Mexico, Poland, the Far East.

Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don’t need you.

A lot of nonsense is spoken about work. Some of the finest men I've known were the laziest. Never work because it's expected of you. Find out how much work you must do to live and be happy. Don't do any more.

It was the Sea of Galilee, now known by its Latin name, Mare Tyberiadis, sunk in its deep depression among surrounding hills whose red and brown coloring played across the surface of the water, so that sometimes the lake was its own blue — a deep, pulsating blue of vivid quality which made the heart cry out with joy — while at other times it was red or brown or, where the trees were, green. But always its colors were in motion, a living, twisting kaleidoscope, as marvelous a body of water as there was on earth.

For some time now they had been suspicious of him.

They were the ships of Task Force 77 and they had been sent to destroy the communist-held bridges at Toko-ri.

This is the greatest evil that grows out of a wrong act. Somebody always remembers it … in an evil way.

It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.

As an engineer he favored blunt speech,

In a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Washington, Peking and especially Moscow.

Master of life, guardian of the shorelines, regulator of temperatures and heaving sculptor of mountains, the great ocean existed.