The World Is My Home Quotes

“And of course I carry a dictionary, the best available. Sometimes when I have to look up a word, I waste a great deal of time because I start to read the dictionary as if it were a novel that makes me eager to see what comes next. The words of English have been endlessly fascinating for me and I would judge that I have mastered not more than a sixth of them. If the total runs to something like 550,000, that would be 92,000, and that figure might be far too high. But my word chase goes on and the interest never flags.”
—James A. Michener, “The World Is My Home”, Chapter VII “Ideas”, page 232”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home

“On the day I started my self-examination I asked myself these questions: ‘Am I interested in people? Do ideas excite me? Am I knowledgeable enough about novels to write one?’ I’m sure there were other questions, but I forget them now.
My earliest memories involve being one among many other children, so I did not grow up with a self-centered view of myself, and because of my early jobs I knew a great deal about life. I had knocked about America as a lad, seen Europe in my college years and had been in the Pacific as an adult. But most important, I had always loved people, their histories, the prestigious things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them.
As for ideas on which to base my writing, I was interested in everything—I was a kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner that picked up not only the oddest collection of facts imaginable but also solid material on the basic concerns of life.”
—Chapter XI, “Intellectual Equipment”, page 297”
― James A. Michener, The World Is My Home