Ernest Gaines Quotations

Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That's the only thing.

There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past.

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

Grace under pressure isn't just about bullfighters and men at war. It's about getting up every day to face a job or a white boss you don't like but have to face to feed your children so they'll grow up to be a better generation.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth - and that's a myth.

Today I must write a paragraph or a page better than I did yesterday.

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.

Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.

All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.

The mark of fear is not easily removed.

I write to try to find out who I am. One of my main themes is manliness. I think I'm trying to figure out what manliness really is.

What I miss today more than anything else - I don't go to church as much anymore - but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.

I think I'm a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don't only believe in God, I know there's God.

When I'm sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.

In the beginning, I tried to be a more cosmopolitan writer, but I realized that I was a country boy, and I had to deal with things I knew about and where I came from.

I was raised by a lady that was crippled all her life but she did everything for me and she raised me. She washed our clothes, cooked our food, she did everything for us. I don't think I ever heard her complain a day in her life. She taught me responsibility towards my brother and sisters and the community.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.

I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

I write with as much objectivity as I can.

We looked at each other, and I could see in those big reddened eyes that he was not going to scream. He was full of anger - and who could blame him? - but he was no fool. He needed me, and he wanted me here, if only to insult me.

If I were to give one piece of advice, I would say to never accept anything that you hear or see at face value. As a general rule of thumb, then the more you question, the better.

I like the sound of people's voices, and I think what a man says can very well tell what he's thinking, whether he's lying or not.

And I thought to myself, What am I doing? Am I reaching them at all? They are acting exactly as the old men did earlier. They are fifty years younger, maybe more, but doing the same thing those old men did who never attended school a day in their lives. Is it just a vicious circle? Am I doing anything?

We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?

You learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.

...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.

How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?

Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free. Yes, they must believe, they must believe. Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.

But let us say he was (guilty). Let us for a moment say he was (guilty). What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.

I still don't even know if the sheriff will let me see him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?

Now, about that mulatto teacher and me. There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything. He hated me, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. I didn't like him, but I needed him, needed him to tell me something that none of the others could or would.

"What for?" I said. "What for, Tante Lou? He treated me the same way he treated her. He wants me to feel guilty, just as he wants her to feel guilty. Well, I'm not feeling guilty, Tante Lou. I didn't put him there. I do everything I know how to do to keep people like him from going there. He's not going to make me feel guilty."

"You going back," she said. "You ain't going to run away from this, Grant."

There will always be men struggling...

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.

In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.

Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he's the One.

The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.

You've got to bend with the wind or you're broken.

He told us that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts.

We all have much more in common than we have difference. I would say that about people all over the world. They don't know how much in common that they have

And that's all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we - each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better.

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.

Nietzsche said without music, life would be a mistake. To me, without books, life would be a mistake.

Don't tell me to believe. Don't tell me to believe in the same God or laws that men believe in who commit these murders. Don't tell me to believe that God can bless this country and that men are judged by their peers. Who among his peers judged him? Was I there? Was the minister there? Was Harry Williams there? Was Farrell Jarreau? Was my aunt? Was Vivian? No, his peers did not judge him, and I will not believe.

I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.

I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.