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If a young aspirant had a modicum of skill and a busy typewriter she or he would sooner or later get a foothold in one of the magazines and a leaping start on the ladder upward.
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
Would
Skill
Modicum
Magazines
Leaping
Busy
Typewriter
Later
Typewriters
Skills
Upward
Start
Ladder
Young
Ladders
Aspirant
Writing
Sooner
Foothold
More quotes by James A. Michener
I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?
James A. Michener
I've spent my life trying to be better than I was, and I am a brother to all who share the same aspiration.
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
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
A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.
James A. Michener
...when men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness on their eyes.
James A. Michener
I think young people ought to seek that differential experience that is going to knock them off dead center. I was a typical American school boy. I happened to get straight A's and be pretty good in sports. But I had no great vision of what I could be. And I never had any yearning.
James A. Michener
Things are going to go wrong, and I think we are false to life if we don’t portray it. But there is also the hope that some lucky clown is going to come along and stumble into the gold mine. And I think you are also entitled to hold out that hope.
James A. Michener
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
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
If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.
James A. Michener
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
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
James A. Michener
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
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
[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
The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.
James A. Michener
In six pages, I can't even say Hello.
James A. Michener
The decent thing to do is to get rid of some of this money.
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