Top 100 Edna Ferber Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A closed mind is a dying mind.”

— Edna Ferber

2. “Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.”

— Edna Ferber

3. “It’s terrible to realize that you don’t learn how to live until you’re ready to die; and, then it’s too late.”

— Edna Ferber

4. “Big doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren’t better than violets.”

— Edna Ferber

5. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

6. “The goat’s business is none of the sheep’s concern.”

— Edna Ferber

7. “In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.”

— Edna Ferber

Featured in: Quotes About New York

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

— Edna Ferber

9. “Nicknames are fond names. We do not give them to people we dislike.”

— Edna Ferber

10. “It’s difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn’t time for bad writing in a short story.”

— Edna Ferber

11. “It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn’t here.”

— Edna Ferber

12. “The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.”

— Edna Ferber

13. “I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.”

— Edna Ferber

14. “I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.”

— Edna Ferber

15. “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!”

— Edna Ferber

16. “But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.”

— Edna Ferber

17. “Texas history is a varied, tempestuous, and vast as the state itself. Texas yesterday is unbelievable, but no more incredible than Texas today. Today’s Texas is exhilarating, exasperating, violent, charming, horrible, delightful, alive.”

— Edna Ferber

18. “About mistakes it’s funny. You got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs they get mad.”

— Edna Ferber

19. “Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life’s Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrees, the hors d’oeuvres, and the things a la though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe and sane, and sure.”

— Edna Ferber

20. “Funny, isn’t it, how your whole life goes by while you think you’re only planning the way you’re going to live it?”

— Edna Ferber

21. “The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness.”

— Edna Ferber

22. “Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love – or tries to.”

— Edna Ferber

23. “Writing, to be memorable, must be done in a state of impassioned serenity.”

— Edna Ferber

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

— Edna Ferber

25. “Christmas is not a season. It is a feeling.”

— Edna Ferber

26. “If men ever discovered how tough women actually are, they would be scared to death.”

— Edna Ferber

27. “The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.”

— Edna Ferber

28. “A writer’s working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn’t.”

— Edna Ferber

29. “A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.”

— Edna Ferber

30. “Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.”

— Edna Ferber

31. “One can summon courage and fortitude to face tragedy; irritations and frustrations are a cloud of mosquitoes that nip and sting and drive one frantic.”

— Edna Ferber

32. “Take Texas the way Texas takes bourbon. Straight. It goes down easier.”

— Edna Ferber

33. “No woman ought to pretend she’s intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn’t.”

— Edna Ferber

34. “Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.”

— Edna Ferber

35. “There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.”

— Edna Ferber

36. “There are people who have a penchant for cities-more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulsebeats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.”

— Edna Ferber

37. “I don’t know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.”

— Edna Ferber

38. “I like any place that isn’t here.”

— Edna Ferber

39. “A whole roomful of Jews is like a charged battery. The vitality sparks seem to fly, and frequently the result is a short circuit.”

— Edna Ferber

40. “Cherry cobbler is shortcake with a soul.”

— Edna Ferber

41. “Housework’s the hardest work in the world. That’s why men won’t do it.”

— Edna Ferber

42. “Men often marry their mothers.”

— Edna Ferber

43. “I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.”

— Edna Ferber

44. “I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.”

— Edna Ferber

45. “The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whisky. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.”

— Edna Ferber

46. “A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it’s ready to serve.”

— Edna Ferber

47. “Science had married the wilderness and was taming the savage shrew.”

— Edna Ferber

48. “But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

— Edna Ferber

49. “If it’s freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.”

— Edna Ferber

50. “It was part of theTexas ritual? We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.”

— Edna Ferber