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It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.

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
Changing
King
Kings
Difficult
Gods

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...when men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.
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The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you.
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I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
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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.
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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.
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If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.
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The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
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The extreme geniality of San Francisco's economic, intellectual and political climate makes it the most varied and challenging city in the United States.
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The dead are dead but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.
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For this is the journey that men and women make, to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter much else what they find.
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[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.
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I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
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The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.
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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.
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All I can do is play the game the way the cards fall.
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In a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Washington, Peking and especially Moscow.
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No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.
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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.
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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.
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No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before.
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