Top 160 James Clavell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “For a woman, old age is never pretty.”

— James Clavell

102. “Yes. My ship’ll be like her, he promised himself. She’ll be trim and miniature and perfect like a Yoshitomo blade, and that’s the best in the world, and just as dangerous. Next year she’ll take a prize twenty times her own weight, like Mariko did at Osaka, ans she’ll rip the enemy out of Asia.”

— James Clavell

103. “My captain will help you be very quick. Within three sticks.” The unit of time was the time it took for a standard stick of incense to smolder away, approximately one hour for one stick.”

— James Clavell

104. “An army of helpers for the twenty-eight cooks were preparing the meats and vegetables, plucking chickens, killing fresh fish and lobsters and crabs and cleaning them, doing the thousand tasks that Chinese food requires – as each dish is cooked freshly for each customer.”

— James Clavell

105. “Like every serious student, follow the most important law for all students: repay your teacher by making it your duty to surpass him!”

— James Clavell

106. “A wise man prepares for treachery.”

— James Clavell

107. “There can only be one Tai-Pan.”

— James Clavell

108. “What is pain to a man? A privilege!”

— James Clavell

109. “Oh yes,” Dunstan Barre said sadly. “Casey, in war to survive you have to stretch things a bit sometimes. As to trading, Marlowe, I agree, most times you have to equate the problem to the time and place. I thank God I was never caught. Don’t think I’d’ve survived, know I wouldn’t.”

— James Clavell

110. “It’s unseemly to criticize without knowledge.”

— James Clavell

111. “Their souls touch and I seem to be more aware of God because of it.”

— James Clavell

112. “Let’s compete freely. Goddam tariffs! Free trade and free seas – that’s what’s right!”

— James Clavell

113. “That’s the first rule of survival in enemy waters: volunteer nothing.”

— James Clavell

114. “Women don’t have wisdom or knowledge in political things.”

— James Clavell

115. “How could such a pretty girl become known as the Hag, she wondered. It must be hateful to become old in face and body when you’re young at heart and still strong and tough – so unfair for a woman.”

— James Clavell

116. “The talk had turned to business, and in the few short hours she had learned more about Hong Kong techniques than through all the reading she had done. More and more it was clear that unless you were on the inside, real power and real riches would escape you.”

— James Clavell

117. “Perhaps that is why we love life so much, Anjin-san. You see, we have to. Death is part of our air and see and earth.”

— James Clavell

118. “If you allow Their chill to reach Into the great, great deep, You become one with them, Inarticulate.”

— James Clavell

119. “Vietnam’s going to be a big problem for your government unless it’s very smart.” Bartlett said confidently, “Thank God it is. JFK handled Cuba. He’ll handle Vietnam too. He made the Big K back off there and he can do it again. We won that time. The Soviets took their missiles out.”

— James Clavell

120. “So many firsts. Yes. And so many deaths to win them.”

— James Clavell

121. “Fallibility in a leader is very trying. Isn’t it? They spill so much of other people’s blood.”

— James Clavell

122. “Remember, child,” her father had drummed into her, “remember that advice, good advice, comes from unexpected places at unexpected times.”

— James Clavell

123. “But she wasn’t a virgin and that hurt Grey, for she had implied it many times. But he pretended that he didn’t know she had cheated him.”

— James Clavell

124. “Remember that fortune and misfortune should be left to heaven and natural law. They are not to be bough by prayer or any cunning device to be thought of by any man or self-styled saint. p848.”

— James Clavell

125. “God curse me and my lack of wits! Why don’t I know what to do easily?”

— James Clavell

126. “Those fanatics’ll never live at peace with one another even though they could, easily. They will never bury their differences even if it costs them their stupid lives.” He laughed.”

— James Clavell

127. “It’s amputate or die. Simple. And when it comes down to it, you can’t die. Not yet. Once you’re born, you are obligated to survive. At all costs.”

— James Clavell

128. “As to Vietnam, no one here thinks President Kennedy can handle that either, much as we admire him personally.”

— James Clavell

129. “It’s a hard life for a woman, Felicity,” he had said before. And she had said, “Any life is hard for a woman.”

— James Clavell

130. “So easy now that Elder Sister has explained to her what all young girls in houses are taught – that with care and meticulous acting and tears of pretended pain and fear, and the final modest telltale stains cautiously placed, a girl can, if necessary, be virgin ten times for ten different men.”

— James Clavell

131. “He had long since discovered that peaceful sleep could provide the answer to most puzzles, and if not, what did it really matter? Wasn’t life just a dewdrop within a dewdrop?”

— James Clavell

132. “Wildcat strikes are the way of the future. With wildcats we can get around union hierarchies without disrupting existing unionism. Our unions’re fragmented. Deliberately. Fifty men can be a separate union and that union can dominate thousands – and so long as there’s never a secret ballot, the few will always rule the many!”

— James Clavell

133. “Only a real man has the right to stand at the pinnacle.”

— James Clavell

134. “The Blessed Jesus said, ‘First cast the mote out of your own eye before you cast the beam out of mine.”

— James Clavell

135. “People are “the company” and those in charge can and always will hide behind that facade, that “the company must survive,” or “for the good of the company,” and so on, wrecking or promoting for personal reasons, enmities or hatreds.”

— James Clavell

136. “To think bad thoughts is really the easiest in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness.”

— James Clavell

137. “Don Sisco y Vivera, in July of 1588.”

— James Clavell

138. “It’s vast to be alive,” he said happily. “I can almost hear the rain waiting to be born.”

— James Clavell

139. “I really don’t understand them, the capitalists. They delude themselves. We’re openly committed to consume them but they give us the means to do it.”

— James Clavell

140. “I even heard that part of a very large government loan to South Vietnam was expended on a nonexistent airfield that’s still impenetrable jungle.”

— James Clavell

141. “It’s the right of every red-blooded American to avoid taxes, but not evade them.”

— James Clavell

142. “Poor God,” Blackthorne said. “The stupidities He gets blamed for!”

— James Clavell

143. “It’s all so simple, Anjin-san. Just change your concept of the world.”

— James Clavell

144. “They’re wise in China. There the first of a dynasty’s always a peasant or the son of a peasant, and the throne’s always taken by force with bloody hands. No hereditary caste there – isn’t that China’s strength?”

— James Clavell

145. “Yesterday, because of Mrs. Struan’s letter to him, he had been confronted with an immortal truth: however loyal you are to a company, however much service you give “the company,” the company can and will spit you out at its whim, without conscience.”

— James Clavell

146. “Oh, yes. Every year in this Land of the Gods we have earth tremors. And fires and flood and Great Waves, and the monster storms – the tai-funs. Nature is very strong with us.’ Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. ‘Perhaps that is why we love life so much, Anjin-san. You see, we have to. Death is part of our air and sea and earth. You should know, Anjin-san, in this Land of Tears, death is our heritage.”

— James Clavell

147. “No honor. No cojones. Except to burn innocents in the name of God.”

— James Clavell

148. “Isn’t it only through laughter that we become one with the gods and thus can endure life and can overcome all the horror and waste and suffering here on earth? Like tonight, watching all those brave men meet their fate here, on this shore, on this gentle night, through a karma ordained a thousand lifetimes ago, or perhaps even one. Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?”

— James Clavell

149. “It hurts and it costs you. It costs you plenty and the attorneys get most, get a good part and they cleverly fan the fire between you for their own goddamn gain.”

— James Clavell

150. “You must be patient before you criticize.”

— James Clavell