About mistakes, it's funny. You've got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs, they get mad.

— Edna Ferber

A life like this develops the comedy sense. You can't play tragedy while you're living it.

— Edna Ferber

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 warmhearted, overfriendly; 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.

— Edna Ferber

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.

— Edna Ferber

Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.

— Edna Ferber

A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.

— Edna Ferber

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

— Edna Ferber

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

— Edna Ferber

Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.

— Edna Ferber

I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.

— Edna Ferber