Homer Hickam Quotes

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Homer Hickam

Profession : Author

Birth : February 19, 1943

Remember, it isn't the dreamers who have good lives - it's the doers. Remember also what I call the three Ps of success: passion, planning, and perseverance.

Homer Hickam

To be a great nation and a great people, you have to do great things.

Homer Hickam

One thing we've learned about space is that the human body starts to fall apart after relatively short exposures to microgravity.

Homer Hickam

'Rocket Boys,' for one reason or the other, just happened to strike a chord across country and across world, maybe because it's set in a little coal-mining town. That's why NASA likes it - most of the engineers come from towns very similar.

Homer Hickam

I have always found the best way to live is to be optimistic and energetic and willing to work hard for my dreams as well as the dreams of others.

Homer Hickam

My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward.

Homer Hickam

Interestingly, 'October Sky' is an anagram of 'Rocket Boys', the same letters just moved around. This was discovered by director Joe Johnston using an anagram program on his computer.

Homer Hickam

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.

Homer Hickam

Throughout my childhood, when I raised my blanket in the morning, I saw a black, sparkling powder float off it. My socks were always black with coal dirt when I took off my shoes at night.

Homer Hickam

After I'd gotten a year under my belt in college, I thought I'd outgrown my home.

Homer Hickam

All my life, everything important that had ever happened had always happened somewhere else. But Sputnik was right there in front of my eyes in my backyard... I felt that if I stretched out enough, I could touch it.

Homer Hickam

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

Homer Hickam

The mining towns I describe in the 'Helium-3' novel series are not unlike Coalwood, but there is one major difference: Those towns, rather than being located in the Appalachian coalfields, are on the moon.

Homer Hickam

My father use to say if coal died, the country died. He was right. Our economy rests on the back of the coal miner. If we did not have the black diamonds of the mountains to burn, we would lose more than half of the nation's energy reserves.

Homer Hickam

When I began to write my books about Coalwood, I was surprised to discover, upon reflection, that it wasn't an ordinary place at all.

Homer Hickam

For a country like ours that needs to stay ahead of the world or go under, we must do great, ambitious things - like going to the moon - to survive.

Homer Hickam

After marketing surveys by Universal Studios indicated that 'Rocket Boys' as a movie title would not attract the female over-age-thirty demographic, the film was retitled and released as 'October Sky.'

Homer Hickam

When I was a boy, one of my favorite places to go was a pine-filled hollow high on the mountain behind our house. It was a place where the industrial song of Coalwood subsided. I would sit on a dead log and listen to nothing except the beating of my own heart and the thoughts racing through my head.

Homer Hickam

I've seen the government up close and personal, and for the most part, it's inefficient and hidebound, and it stifles creativity in any industry it clutches within its well-meaning but slimy tentacles.

Homer Hickam

Boeing, LockMart, and hundreds of other companies, large and small, work in the space business, and they also create new techniques and technology; but they'd be nowhere if NASA and the Department of Defense hadn't shown the way by funding the first big rockets and satellites.

Homer Hickam