Quotes from Herman Wouk

Write a page a day. It will add up.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.

About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.

The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history.

I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

A leader can't dash ahead around the bend out of sight.

The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.

The President has a quick and able mind, though not everybody gives him that, not by a long shot.

Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.

She had learned from her encounter with Mike Eden that there really was more than one man in the world-the piece of knowledge that more than anything else divides women from girls.

Your country baffles me: a luxurious unharmed lotus land in which great hordes of handsome dynamic people either wallow in deep gloom, or play like overexcited children, or fall to work like all the devils in hell, while the press steadily drones detestation of the government and despair of the system. I don't understand how America works, any more than Frances Trollope or Dickens did, but it's an ongoing miracle of sorts.

Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu--and a recognizable part--unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return.

Aye aye, sir." Willie saluted and emerged into the sunlight, through the one loophole that military wisdom can never quite button up—the sympathy of the downtrodden for each other.

The UN is all screams and twitters, like a ladies' room when a guy barges in. A

Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identiy, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of the ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before.

No adult is without problems except a happy imbecile.

the nameless maiden in the advertisement was like a thousand other clothing models he had seen in magazines—arched brows, big eyes, angular cheeks, pouting mouth, a fetching figure, and a haughty, revolted look, as though someone had just offered her a jellyfish to hold.

Either war is finished, or we are.

Tell me, Briny," Natalie said, "are you still having fun?" He looked around at the noisy, crowded, evil-smelling ward, where the Polish women were helplessly bringing new life into a city which was being dynamited to death by the Germans, going through unpostponable birth pangs with the best care the dying city could give them. "More fun than a barrel of monkeys.