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If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.

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
Young
Anything
Writing
Would
Men
Hesitate
Pornography
Print
Except

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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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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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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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The dead are dead but they rely on us to fulfill their hopes.
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I don’t know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish I could be part Negro I could be Irish I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss...
James A. Michener
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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.
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The sense of belonging is one of the great gifts men get in battle.
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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.
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It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing.
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It takes courage to know when you ought to be afraid.
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A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.
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Religious hatreds ought not to be propagated at all, but certainly not on a tax-exempt basis.
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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.
James A. Michener
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I was once asked if I'd like to meet the president of a certain country. I said, No, but I'd love to meet some sheepherders. The sheepherders, farmers and taxi drivers are often the most interesting people.
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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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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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America is a nation with many flaws, but hopes so vast that only the cowardly would refuse to acknowledge them.
James A. Michener
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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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A poet sees things in two ways: First, as a child who never saw it before, and Second, as a dying man who will never see it again.
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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.
James A. Michener