Top 150 James A. Michener Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “We all hurt other people, especially those we love... civilized people were the ones who had learned to hurt according to rules.”

— James A. Michener

102. “But in spring, of course, any place is beautiful, because in spring fires leap from your heart, and you can see things that aren’t there.”

— James A. Michener

103. “For of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do.”

— James A. Michener

104. “Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door.”

— James A. Michener

105. “I am sure old men forget what it was to be young and to be wholly in love. Not even I can remember those breathless moments. That’s why they give old men important jobs and big salaries and orchestras to lead. To pay us back for the terrible loss we have sustained.”

— James A. Michener

106. “I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.”

— James A. Michener

107. “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.”

— James A. Michener

108. “The great writers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few years in the South Seas, but their memory of those waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the islands commands attention to the vivid world and its even more vivid inhabitants.”

— James A. Michener

109. “I have only one bit of advice to beginning writers: be sure your novel is read by Rodgers and Hammerstein.”

— James A. Michener

110. “Only a mind steeped in true love can write irony. The others write satire.”

— James A. Michener

111. “No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.”

— James A. Michener

112. “The city of Los Angeles is now some twenty-four hundred miles south of central Alaska, and since it is moving slowly northward as the San Andreas fault slides irresistibly along, the city is destined eventually to become part of Alaska. If.”

— James A. Michener

113. “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.”

— James A. Michener

114. “Keep your eye on the simple problems. Solve them, and everything else falls into place.”

— James A. Michener

115. “Poets are simply people who see things two ways. Like children, as if they had never seen them before. Like old men, as if they would never see them again.”

— James A. Michener

116. “It may seem contradictory, but in the languid tropics one spends more time contemplating those great good things of sound and sight and smell.”

— James A. Michener

117. “It took her three seconds-one, two, three-to know that her destiny required her to join this man, and his gun and his wagon, and his waiting horses. She had no conception of what was being asked of her, but she knew that there could be no viable alternative. She dashed inside the orphanage and grabbed the few things that belonged to her.”

— James A. Michener

118. “With my pen I have engraved warrants of citizenship in the most remote corners, for truly the world has been my home.”

— James A. Michener

119. “But thinking is something different, altogether! Think always as if the hot hand of hell were grabbing for you. Think to the limit of your mind. Imagine, dream, hope, want things, drive yourself to goodness. Whatever you do... do it to the absolute best of your ability. Never take the easy way where thinking is concerned.”

— James A. Michener

120. “Lincoln, who had a personal aversion to blacks and feared they could never be absorbed into a white society, wanted to see them settled somewhere out of the country. He had prudently refrained from liberating those living in important border states like Kentucky and Maryland, whose governments sided with the North; only slaves in states like Alabama and Louisiana were freed.”

— James A. Michener

121. “Denali, the glory of Alaska, soars to more than twenty thousand and is one of the most compelling mountains in the Americas.”

— James A. Michener

122. “Many people who want to be writers don’t really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.”

— James A. Michener

123. “And wherever you go on the face of the earth have the humility to think that a thousand years ago someone pretty much like you stood there and a thousand years from now a boy like you will be there. And in two thousand years boys and places and people will have been pretty much the same.”

— James A. Michener

124. “Nor was Israel’s historic claim to the land impressive; to Cullinane it was irrelevant. Once a man started opening the historical-rights barrel of eels, no one could predict where the slippery evidence might run.”

— James A. Michener

125. “As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.”

— James A. Michener

126. “Sometimes when the Japanese maids, in crisp white uniforms, had withdrawn, a Roosevelt appointee would ask timorously, “These Japanese, can they be trusted?” And The Fort invariably replied, “We’ve had Sumiko for eighteen years, and we’ve never known a better or more loyal maid.”

— James A. Michener

127. “The opening sentence alone contained thirty-six words – monstrous.”

— James A. Michener

128. “I’ve been afraid even to go out in my snowfall, let alone my blizzard.”

— James A. Michener

129. “Patriotism is not a matter of the skin’s color. It is a matter of the heart.”

— James A. Michener

130. “The Aleutian word for Great Land was Alaxsxaq, and when Europeans reached the Aleutian Islands, their first stopping point in this portion of the arctic, and asked the people what name the lands hereabout had, they replied “Alaxsxaq,” and in the European tongues this became Alaska.”

— James A. Michener

131. “Undisciplined, determined to be free.”

— James A. Michener

132. “Traveler, you who sail into the Caribbean in silvered yacht or gilded cruise ship, pause as you enter these waters to remember that deep below rest three men of honor who helped determine the history of this onetime Spanish Lake: Sir John Hawkins, builder of the English navy; Sir Francis Drake, conqueror of all known seas; and Admiral Ledesma, stubborn enhancer of his king’s prerogatives and the interests of his own strong family.”

— James A. Michener

133. “Love is the self-revelation of two souls. Sometimes it comes in a blinding moment in only one day, sometimes after a slow awakening of eleven years. God takes no cognizance of the timetable.”

— James A. Michener

134. “That’s the world that matters. The world where people glitter like diamonds with a million facets. Where people are like pearls, luminous as nacre on the surface but each with a speck that would destroy it if you were looking only for specks.”

— James A. Michener

135. “A man charged with a crime has a right to a lawyer, and when the community is most strongly against him, his right is morally greatest.”

— James A. Michener

136. “Alaska has had to focus upon the.”

— James A. Michener

137. “The mariachis grinned and the leader apologized: “We thought you were only a norteamericano.” I winced at this pejorative term but said nothing, because I knew that proud Mexicans liked to remind visitors from the north, “Everyone on this continent is an americano, you’re a norteamericano. Don’t rob us of our name by stealing it for yourselves.”

— James A. Michener

138. “But if I turn my back on a supposed communist, how do I know that I am not turning my back on the very concept of liberty that I am seeking to protect? Honest men can always get someone to defend them. But what does justice mean if apparently dishonest men can find no one?”

— James A. Michener

139. “I do wish you’d break the careless habit of using the word American as if you had stolen it from the rest of us. Use norteamericano, because we Cubans and Mexicans and Uruguayans, we’re also Americans.”

— James A. Michener

140. “People and places know greatness for a while, then decline.”

— James A. Michener

141. “To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne.”

— James A. Michener

142. “The mystic perceives with his heart what the mind knows to be true... but cannot prove.”

— James A. Michener

143. “George T. Myers.”

— James A. Michener

144. “When you are a citizen, the earth feels different.”

— James A. Michener

145. “The world is a muddy place, and if good men don’t try to clean it up, bad men will make it a swamp.”

— James A. Michener

146. “Don’t ever buy Monks Fishing, Stanley.”

— James A. Michener

147. “I doubt, dearest child, that you could ever marry a Frenchman. They’re not dependable. I’ve never believed that they’re serious Catholics.” He.”

— James A. Michener

148. “With this acceptance of the candy, the marriage was agreed upon.”

— James A. Michener

149. “If you try it,” Whip said, “you’ll be thrown out on your inalienable ass.”

— James A. Michener

150. “What did the hat say to the hatrack? You stay here and I’ll go on a head.”

— James A. Michener