Top 40 Ernest Gaines Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We all have much more in common than we have difference. I would say that about people all over the world. They don’t know how much in common that they have.”

— Ernest Gaines

2. “Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That’s the only thing.”

— Ernest Gaines

3. “Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.”

— Ernest Gaines

4. “I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.”

— Ernest Gaines

5. “I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.”

— Ernest Gaines

6. “Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.”

— Ernest Gaines

7. “The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.”

— Ernest Gaines

8. “There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.”

— Ernest Gaines

9. “The mark of fear is not easily removed.”

— Ernest Gaines

10. “Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.”

— Ernest Gaines

11. “There will always be men struggling...”

— Ernest Gaines

12. “Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?”

— Ernest Gaines

13. “You’ve got to bend with the wind or you’re broken.”

— Ernest Gaines

14. “I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.”

— Ernest Gaines

15. “The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he’s less of a man. That’s just a condition of society that such things exist.”

— Ernest Gaines

16. “How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”

— Ernest Gaines

17. “Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.”

— Ernest Gaines

18. “Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn’t like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.”

— Ernest Gaines

19. “If I were to give one piece of advice, I would say to never accept anything that you hear or see at face value. As a general rule of thumb, then the more you question, the better.”

— Ernest Gaines

20. “Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.”

— Ernest Gaines

21. “What I miss today more than anything else – I don’t go to church as much anymore – but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.”

— Ernest Gaines

22. “He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.”

— Ernest Gaines

23. “I still don’t even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I’m still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?”

— Ernest Gaines

24. “The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can’t have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.”

— Ernest Gaines

25. “When I’m sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.”

— Ernest Gaines

26. “We wait till now? Now, when we’re old men, we get to be brave?”

— Ernest Gaines

27. “We looked at each other, and I could see in those big reddened eyes that he was not going to scream. He was full of anger – and who could blame him? – but he was no fool. He needed me, and he wanted me here, if only to insult me.”

— Ernest Gaines

28. “I think I’m a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don’t only believe in God, I know there’s God.”

— Ernest Gaines

29. “And that’s all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we – each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better.”

— Ernest Gaines

30. “A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on earth – and that’s a myth.”

— Ernest Gaines

31. “I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I’m trying to figure out what manliness really is.”

— Ernest Gaines

32. “In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.”

— Ernest Gaines

33. “Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he’s the One.”

— Ernest Gaines

34. “I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.”

— Ernest Gaines

35. “Everything’s been said, but it needs saying again.”

— Ernest Gaines

36. “I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.”

— Ernest Gaines

37. “I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn’t novel.”

— Ernest Gaines

38. “I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn’t be the writing.”

— Ernest Gaines

39. “I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.”

— Ernest Gaines

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.”

— Ernest Gaines

41. “I like the sound of people’s voices, and I think what a man says can very well tell what he’s thinking, whether he’s lying or not.”

— Ernest Gaines

42. “All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.”

— Ernest Gaines

43. “I write with as much objectivity as I can.”

— Ernest Gaines