Edna Ferber
Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.Collection: Wisdom
If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.Collection: Politics
Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.Collection: Death
Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.Collection: Business
Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.Collection: Christmas
Roast beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.Collection: Food
Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.Collection: Death
A closed mind is a dying mind.
Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.
Any garment which is cut to fit you is much more becoming, even if it is not so splendid as a garment which has been cut to fit somebody not of your stature.
It's terrible to realize you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die, and then it's too late.
A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.
A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.
Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?Collection: Life
If men ever discovered how tough women actually are, they would be scared to death.Collection: Men
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!Collection: Writing
Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrees, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things a la though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe and sane, and sure.Collection: Philosophy
The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whisky. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.Collection: Men
It's terrible to realize that you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die; and, then it's too late.Collection: Too Late
There are ... just two kinds of girls. Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don't.Collection: Girl
America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.Collection: Ocean
Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.Collection: Sweet Love
I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.Collection: Writing
There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.Collection: Country
There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind's wheat and the other kind's emeralds.Collection: Two
... home isn't always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody or something needs you.Collection: Home
I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.Collection: Doors
Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.Collection: Giving
But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.Collection: Garden
Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.Collection: Children
Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love - or tries to.Collection: Trying
I never go to weddings. Waste of time. Person can get married a dozen times. Lots of folks do. Family like ours, know everybody in the state of Texas and around outside, why, you could spend your life going to weddings. But a funeral, that's different. You only die once.Collection: Texas
To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge -- this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.Collection: Unique
Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character ... A good deal like human beings.Collection: Beautiful
celebratin' New Year's Eve is like eatin' oranges. You got to let go your dignity t' really enjoy 'em.Collection: Letting Go
Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.Collection: Writing
I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.Collection: Children
Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.Collection: Marriage
It was part of theTexas ritual? We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.Collection: Caviar
When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong.Collection: War
[Women] ... is nothin' but little girls in long skirts, and their hair done up.Collection: Girl
There's no sauce for play like work.Collection: Play
The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness.Collection: Smart
Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.Collection: Book
All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.Collection: Baby
Now gae your wa'sTho'anes as gude As ever happit flesh and blude, Yet part we maunthe case sae hard is, Amang the writers and the bardies That lang they'll brook the auld I trow, Or neibours cry,'Weel brook the new'.Collection: Flesh
writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.Collection: Witty
Imported actors, like certain wines, sometimes do not stand the ocean trip. This can be as true of American actors in Europe as it is of European actors in America.Collection: Ocean
A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.Collection: Inspirational