James A. Michener

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

"Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them."

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

"Very early on in life, I decided the hell with it: material things weren't for me. Christmas would come, and other kids would have all these presents, and it wouldn't bother me a bit."

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

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

"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."

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

"I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation. [Interview, Parade magazine, 24 November 1991]"

"Because I am for them, Commander, because their ancestors stood up to that Nazi, Bligh, just like I would be for one little Jew, terrified and hungry, crossing the Pyrenees to get away to freedom from the Gestapo. One little Jew. You wouldn't have him in your house. He stinks, he has lice. But, you know what, Commander? I am for him, every time.” And he would punch me in the shoulder and lug his M-1 up onto the ridge, night after night."

"I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)]"

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

"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."

"I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)]"

"I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?"

"Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually."

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

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