17 James Michener Quotes on Writing

James Michener quotes on writing

1. In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, 'But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled.'

2. I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.

7. Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door.

15. Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.

16. The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

19. 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.

20. I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.

34. 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.

37. A writer can make a fortune in America, but he can't make a living.

39. Gore Vidal, who wrote Williwaw at only nineteen, was another whose early book could well have been his last, but instead he wrote a series of books that varied in subject matter from the critical days of early Christianity to the dramatic eras of American history to outrageous sexual games. I envy him two novels on whose subjects I also did a great deal of work: Julian, which deals with the apostate who tried to turn back Christianity in ancient Antiochea, and 1876, which covers the amazing incident in American history that year when the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes stole the presidential election from the Democrat Samuel J.Tilden.

40. 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.

41. I am right now in the middle of a difficult writing project. And it's just as difficult now as when I started. But when I get up in the morning I am really qualified to say, 'Well, Jim, it isn't going too well, but there is nobody on the block who is better able to wrestle with it than you are, so let's get on with it.'

43. 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.

44. I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

45. 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.

54. Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don't need you.

55. Rice Krispies happens to be one of my favorite junk foods, just as I regard Michener as superior among junk writers.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.