How adversity doth ope the eye! A moon can be seen by day as well as by night; but, to see the stars, you must be in darkness.
The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.
The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.
The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.
If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.
I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the "typical liberal" - as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.
Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of National Geographics, is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.
Once the inner connection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice -- Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (July 11, 1868)
Honesty is not the best policy - merely the safest
In the end we're all searching for our home, that one place where we belong.
Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is a sort of spontaneous combustion--the oily rags of the head and heart.