Quotes by James A. Michener

“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 hes always doing both.”

“Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.”

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

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

“And no invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before.”

“I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.”

“The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.”

“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.”

“Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.”

“The pen is the tongue of the mind.”

“Write what should not be forgotten”

“In the middle of the silence in a writers house lies an invalid: the book being worked on.”

“Writing is the supreme solace.”

“Writing eases my suffering... writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.”

“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”

“No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one”

“A writers problem does not change. It is always how to write truly and having found out what is true to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.”

“The engineer has been, and is, a maker of history”

“The engineers first problem in any design situation is to discover what the problem really is.”

“A scientist studies what is, an engineer studies what never was.”