Top 150 James A. Michener Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Contrary to what people think, I slave over my books.”

— James A. Michener

102. “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

103. “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

104. “The decent thing to do is to get rid of some of this money.”

— James A. Michener

105. “Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people – any people – as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.”

— James A. Michener

106. “The South Pacific was once the playground for ship-sick European sailors. Then it became the roistering barricade of the last great pirates. Next it was the longed-for escape from the canyons of New York. Then the unwilling theatre for an American military triumph. But now it has become the meeting ground for Asia and America.”

— James A. Michener

107. “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

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

— James A. Michener

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

— James A. Michener

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— James A. Michener

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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. “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

124. “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

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. “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

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

— James A. Michener

129. “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

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

— James A. Michener

131. “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

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

— James A. Michener

133. “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

134. “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

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

— James A. Michener

136. “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

137. “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

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

— James A. Michener

139. “Undisciplined, determined to be free.”

— James A. Michener

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

— James A. Michener

141. “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

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

— James A. Michener

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

— James A. Michener

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

— James A. Michener

145. “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

146. “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

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

— James A. Michener

148. “George T. Myers.”

— James A. Michener

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

— James A. Michener

150. “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