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If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.
James A. Michener
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James A. Michener
Age: 90 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 3
Died: 1997
Died: October 16
Author
Autobiographer
Military Officer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
James Albert Michener
James Michener
Keep
Doesn
Night
Book
Writing
Nights
Anyone
Reading
More quotes by James A. Michener
You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.
James A. Michener
Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.
James A. Michener
The extreme geniality of San Francisco's economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States.
James A. Michener
When this is over, I'm not going to be the same guy. I am going to live as if I were a great man.
James A. Michener
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
James A. Michener
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
America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
James A. Michener
The permanent temptation of life is to confuse dreams with reality. The permanent defeat of life comes when dreams are surrendered to reality.
James A. Michener
No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
James A. Michener
[The church's] job is to provide permanent solace and spiritual leadership to the people as a whole, whatever their government at the moment, so long as it stays within the bounds of moral decency.
James A. Michener
It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.
James A. Michener
a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.
James A. Michener
Although most of us know Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Paul Gauguin in Tahiti as if they were neighbors -- somewhat disreputable but endlessly fascinating -- none of us can name two French generals or department store owners of that period. I take enormous pride in considering myself an artist, one of the necessaries.
James A. Michener
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.
James A. Michener
The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
James A. Michener
About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America.
James A. Michener
Animals form an inalienable fragment of nature, and if we hasten the disappearance of even one species, we diminish our world and our place in it.
James A. Michener
Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.
James A. Michener
The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east
James A. Michener
In six pages, I can't even say Hello.
James A. Michener
