Top 52 War Novel Quotes
#1. I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.
Kevin Powers
#2. 'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.
Adrian McKinty
#3. It was said by Abraham Lincoln that Ms. Stowe's novel, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, started the great civil war, the it can be said with certainty that Ms. Brown's novel THE SOUTHERN CROSS reveals the untold story behind the Civil Rights Movement." John Jeter
Alabama Jane Brown
#4. War is an infidel; it holds no loyalties, neither to king nor countryman. She is a whore, selling herself to the highest bidder. Victory is bought in blood and steel.
Brian A. McBride
#5. War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
Gertrude Stein
#6. WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience.
Anita Shreve
#7. It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
Aleksandar Hemon
#8. (The golden goose has died, my prince turned into a frog, the Kingdom is lost, everyone has turned into stone and I am locked in the tower)
Nancy B. Brewer
#9. It may not be the "Great American Novel" they talk about, because its scope is not broad enough to take in all of America, but it pictures the people and the customs and the drama of upstate New York in the days preceding and following the Civil War with a simplicity that, to my mind, is true art.
Clyde Brion Davis
#10. A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.
Jane Green
#11. I hadn't had a chance to read an entire novel in weeks.
Whatever the others might say about politics, civil war, and hunters, the real evil was lack of reading time. If they all read more they might freak out less. And if I was going to live forever I was going to have to start a reading list.
Alyxandra Harvey
#12. I was never a cool person; in fact, cool people have always made fun of me. That's why I loved [the Robert Cormier YA novel] The Chocolate War - because the cool kids (not the establishment) were the villains. I totally identified with that.
Simon Rich
#13. The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.
Annalee Newitz
#14. I think in some ways what Snowden is, is he's a mix of a cold war spy novel and post-9/11 spy novel.
Alex Berenson
#15. My current novel, Pallas , is all about that culture war - in fact it's been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion - and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don't read fiction.
L. Neil Smith
#16. By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
Tom Wolfe
#17. My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.
Ken Follett
#18. What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed. Such
Leo Tolstoy
#20. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
J.G. Ballard
#21. I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.
Douglas Preston
#22. Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.
- Winston S. Churchill
Ellen Brazer
#23. Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
Anthony Marra
#24. Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#25. Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.
Kurt Vonnegut
#26. Max Brooks' novel 'World War Z' is one of the greatest zombie stories ever written, partly for reasons that make it basically unfilmable.
Annalee Newitz
#27. It is impossible for any single medium to fully capture the emotion and intensity of war. The Battlefield 3: The Russian novel is one window into the experience, and the game is another. They complement each other perfectly,
Andy McNab
#28. Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.
Luke Salisbury
#29. Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and
Will Durant
#30. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#31. It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.
Allan Gurganus
#32. The Bible is a novel that's crazy ... it has murder, it has victory it has mayhem, it has disaster, it has war, sanctification.
Fred Hammond
#33. The threat of war hung on the air like a thick fog and it blinded him until he could see nothing beyond the haze. Even the stars grew faint.
Brian A. McBride
#34. When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.
Dick Pirozzolo
#35. I say we have no time for debate. Indeed, we have no need for it, since the decision has been made for us. We must fight. There is no other path!
Kaoru Kurimoto
#36. Though her grasp of English was modest and his Italian non-existent, their rapport was at once intuitive and intimate, founded more on physical attraction and a shared love of the outdoors than meaningful conversation.
Robert Radcliffe
#37. You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.
Mal Peet
#38. If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.
Phil Klay
#39. It takes skill to win a battle, but brains to win a war.
Amy I. Long
#40. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
Karl Marlantes
#41. 'War and Peace' goes down a lot smoother than a Dan Brown novel, let me tell you.
Dave Morris
#42. They're right. We're not fighting for the people anymore, Falcon... Look at us. We're just fighting.
Mike Millar
#43. As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.
Tiffany Madison
#44. A weapon is merely a weapon, nothing more. What matters is how you use it.
Kaoru Kurimoto
#45. You know what, BB? We've got dark spots on our souls. We have to live with that. War is not about doing what's right. War's about surviving."
Verner aka 'Jens'
in the novel 'The Informer' by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
#46. What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.
Robert Gottlieb
#47. I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student - I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel from my parents' bookshelf.
Philipp Meyer
#48. Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes.
Zoe S. Roy
#49. How many remember where they were when the war began on the 1st of September 1939?
I remember.
I should remember.
I started it.
My name is Robert Leroy Parker.
Daniel DeLacy
#50. He was wearing a little bag of "Mojo" around his neck.
Nancy B. Brewer
#52. The pace and urgency of war have always accelerated the development of technology and encouraged novel uses of devices that already exist.
Mark Bowden
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