Top 98 War Writing Quotes
#1. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#2. There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.
Phil Klay
#3. The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.
Matt Gallagher
#4. It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn't trouble to write anything.
Katherine Anne Porter
#5. A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
Ami McKay
#6. But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.
Ernie Pyle
#7. I was a bit shut down by a lot of the snarkiness and biliousness in some of the poetry blogs. I was tired of aesthetic wars that weren't productive and were becoming mean-spirited. I was probably overworked as well, so I stopped reading and writing for about a year.
Simone Muench
#8. The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control.
Jerome Lawrence
#9. Writers can't write as fast as governments make wars; because to write demands thinking.
Bertolt Brecht
#10. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#11. Everything I've ever felt, but could never put into words, is poetically orchestrated through Mat Devine 's writing. In a lonely world, a book like this will make you feel like you belong. Simply put, Weird War One changed my life.
Kat Von D.
#12. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
George Packer
#13. Work, love, courage and hope,
Make me good and help me cope!
Anne Frank
#14. I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
Ernest Hemingway,
#15. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady
Ernest Hemingway,
#16. Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.
Karl Marlantes
#17. "War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.
James Ellroy
#18. Mr. Hitler was big on me. He kept writing and inviting me to come to Germany, and if the war hadn't started when it did, I would have gone and I would have taken a gun out of my purse and shot him, because I am the only person who would not have been searched.
Greta Garbo
#19. The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.
Mary Blakely
#20. A writer's brush is a warrior's bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#21. A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.
Semezdin Mehmedinovic
#22. Some write a narrative of wars and feats, Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history.
William Cowper
#23. I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.
Asne Seierstad
#24. First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.
Pat Barker
#25. Smiles from girls like you are what started the Trojan War.
Amanda Lance
#26. Writing about a war will always be political writing, no matter what amount of hermetical hide-and-seek or aesthetical operations are involved.
Sasa Stanisic
#27. Writing again, he stressed that the events of war are always uncertain. Then, paraphrasing a favorite line from the popular play Cato by Joseph Addison - a line that General Washington, too, would often call upon - Adams told her, We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.
David McCullough
#28. Old soldiers never die, they write novels.
James Jones
#29. I had an idea to write something set back around the Civil War era, but I was just way too ignorant to think I could start it any time soon.
John Brandon
#30. I simply write what I want, wish, long to write ... The state of human life and the god or demon within. The constant internal war that being alive can conjure.
Tanith Lee
#31. When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.
Tim O'Brien
#32. That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.
Christopher Isherwood
#33. The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?
Anne Frank
#34. My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#35. Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#36. Ronald Spiers: The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#37. 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
#38. I can't quite remember the exact moment when I became obsessed with writing a play about the seemingly endless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but I knew that I wanted to somehow tell the stories of the Congolese women caught in the cross-fire.
Lynn Nottage
#39. I am and will always be a HUGE Star Wars Geek and wanted to study film making. I really am not a fan of writing- I prefer storytelling and rather jump to storyboards to relay my vision then a lot of wordy words.
Holly Golightly
#40. On the eve of the Civil War, James Parton could write that 'the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton's knocker.'
James Parton
#41. I think I took a few stabs at writing socially conscious lyrics. I had never intended to write a song about the Gulf War, but when I wrote "Before You Hit The Floor," I didn't know what the hell was going on in the world.
Bucky Pope
#42. I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war.
Phil Klay
#43. The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.
Alfred Nobel
#44. I feel like I partly came to writing through being in college during the start of the Iraq war, and knowing that those issues mattered lot to me, and wanting to go see for myself.
Sarah Stillman
#45. After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#46. I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
Walter Mosley
#47. The word may be mightier than the sword, but except for the s they are pretty much the same. Both are used to kill
and to save.
Linda Stasi
#48. Richmond has fallen - and I have no heart to write about it ... They are too many for us. Everythign lost in Richmond, even our archives. Blue-black is our horizon.
Mary Boykin Chesnut
#49. The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.
Fredric Jameson
#50. My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era.
Ken Follett
#51. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;
Donald Miller
#52. I meant to write a song of battle, for storied deeds of war inspire; I seemed to hear the cannon thunder, I seemed to see the smoke and fire. But oh, the pathos of the ending when brave men conquered in the fight, knelt, kissing yielded blood-stained colors!
my eyes are blurred, I cannot write.
Anne Reeve Aldrich
#53. I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.
Andre Dubus
#54. I think there are writers who take a quieter approach to their work - one that is just about respectfully showing up for your vocation day after day, steadily doing your best, and letting go of the results. Not going to war against anyone else, or against their talents, or against themselves.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#55. Mac [Barnett ] and I have been friends for more than ten years. We met working at an educational nonprofit. And we have been pranking each other the whole time. It's our own version of a prank war. We thought we would channel some of that energy into writing a book.
Jory John
#56. Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.
William Monahan
#57. This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#58. Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine.
Clive James
#59. If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
Virginia Woolf
#60. In real life, couples bond and war over a million different things. The causes of divorce are like beautiful, unique snowflakes.
Howard Mittelmark
#61. Hone your writing skills as if they were your finest weapons of war. For in the literary arena, your pen will truly be your sword.
Max Hawthorne
#62. I am the Penitent God. And tonight, I have begun my battle. My siege. The hundred-thousand Ink-borne arrows, flying forth from my flaming pen, to assault the walls of tyrannical Cold that hold this man in awful rapture. My campaign for my friend's very soul. My war of Ice, Ink, and Ember.
S.G. Night
#63. It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.
Anne Roiphe
#64. A lot of movies that come from Israel are about war, but there is such good, funny, rounded writing that comes from the country that I wish more people would discover.
Odeya Rush
#65. I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.
Gary Paulsen
#66. Now I am writing this diary in English, which for me is not the language of intimacy or love, but an attempt at distance and sanity, a means of recalling normality.
Jasmina Tesanovic
#67. The book of war, the one we've been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.
Max Brooks
#68. To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.
Janine Di Giovanni
#70. War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.
Jeffrey Archer
#71. Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Stanley Kubrick
#72. I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
Jerry Spinelli
#73. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#74. You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books? I say 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?
Kurt Vonnegut
#75. Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#76. To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.
Henrik Ibsen
#77. Writing a picture book is like writing 'War and Peace' in Haiku.
Mem Fox
#78. I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
Joe Haldeman
#79. Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#80. I don't remember Moses writing, 'Thou shalt not kill.. unless you think you have a good reason.
Willie Nelson
#81. Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
David Letterman
#82. It's been a very interesting exercise as a writer - writing a little family group, like The Incredibles or The Simpsons or something like that, and setting it in a big Star Wars-type setting. It's been really fun, definitely different from the kind of thing I normally do.
Mark Millar
#83. Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he would have spent a lot of time without any female contact. He was part of the fellowship of men who went to war, and I think, really, that's what he's writing about.
Richard C. Armitage
#84. I don't write to chase away my demons ~
I wield my pen as a weapon...calling those bastards to war!
Muse
#85. Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.
Michael Cunningham
#86. You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.
Richard Price
#87. The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.
William Carlos Williams
#88. I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.
Charles Stross
#89. Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
Jon Meacham
#90. I'm still suffering from shock from the last war. I was almost drafted! Luckily I was wounded while taking the physical. When I reached the psychiatrist, I said, Give me a gun, I'll wipe out the whole German Army in five minutes. He said, You're crazy! I said, Write it down!
Jackie Mason
#91. There's no way the writing staff of 'Game of Thrones' haven't read 'The Art of War.' There's definitely an influence on 'Game of Thrones' from this book in both a general way and on the character of Lord Baelish and his strategies.
Aidan Gillen
#92. Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.
Charles Caleb Colton
#93. When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of 'War Of The Worlds,' 'Them,' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.
David Gerrold
#94. I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
Winston Churchill
#95. The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.
Rick Atkinson
#96. In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
Umberto Eco
#97. Is it an anti-war book?" "Yes," I said. "I guess." "You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?" "No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?
Kurt Vonnegut
#98. I thought of To Kill a Mockingbird. I had finished reading it one night in a bunker, my knees bent and hunched together while mortars hit the ground, the glow of a cigarette and the moon as my only light. Standing there now, chain-smoking, I felt like I finally understood the ending.
Michael Anthony
