Quotes

I want to make everybody in the world groan with the inevitability of sorrow.

Why was it everything was always so goddam complicated? Even the simplest things was so goddam complicated when you come to doing them.

I'm an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much — and its big, awkward, sprawling people.

The perfect ideal would be that a man who is essentially nonviolent would be able to defend himself against any form of violence. But this is very rare in life.

About Hawaii: Sometimes the air is awfully clear here. You can look off to sea and see the soft, warm, raggedy roof of clouds stretching on and on and on. It almost seems as if you can look right on into eternity.

Humor itself is a kind strange thing in the first place, it's kind of a short-circuit in the brain around horror that saves us from having to face it totally.

Colour makes a difference. Gender makes a difference. Ethnicity makes a difference. Acting as if they don't will create more problems than it will solve.

There's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.

I've made some strides in trying to understand myself, I think. And I think that in my life I'm less afraid of being thought a coward than I used to be.

I don't think that combat has ever been written about truthfully; it has always been described in terms of bravery and cowardice. I won't even accept these words as terms of human reference any more.

On the Army: This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and they feed you like hogs. (1939)

There're so many young guys, you know — young Americans and, yes, young men everywhere — a whole generation of people younger than me who have grown up feeling inadequate as men because they haven't been able to fight in a war and find out whether they are brave or not. Because it is in an effort to prove this bravery that we fight — in wars or in bars — whereas if a man were truly brave he wouldn't have to be always proving it to himself. So therefore I am forced to consider bravery suspect, and ridiculous, and dangerous.

All the time we are talking about how scared we were in the war, we are implying tacitly that we were brave enough to stay. Whereas in actual fact we stayed because we were afraid of being laughed at, or thrown in jail, or shot, as far as that goes.

You have to really work at it to write. I guess there has to be talent first; but even with talent you still have to work at it, to write.

On Thomas Wolfe: In my opinion, little as it's worth, he is the greatest writer that has lived, William Shakespeare included. He is a genius.

History is always written from the viewpoints of the leaders. And increasingly, in our age, war leaders do not get shot at with any serious consistency. Leaders make momentous, world-encompassing historical decisions. It is your average anonymous soldier, or pilot, or naval gunnery rating who has to carry them out on the ground. Where there is often a vast difference between grandiose logic and plans and what takes place on the terrain.

What it is that makes a man go out into dangerous places and get himself shot at with increasing consistency until finally he dies, is an interesting subject for speculation. And an interesting study. One might entitle it, the Evolution of a Soldier.

I write to reach eternity.