Quotes from James Jones

That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.

If I never meet you In this life Let me feel the lack A glance from your eyes Then my life Will be yours

The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it." "But it'd be there.

War don't ennoble men, it turns 'em into dogs. It poisons the soul.

The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.

Fife... simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.

All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to be here.

It takes courage to stand for what you believe in.

They shouldnt teach their immigrants' kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little bit of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is dissociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.

I write to reach eternity

This book is cheerfully dedicated to those greatest and most heroic of all human endeavors, WAR and WARFARE; may they never cease to give us the pleasure, excitement and adrenal stimulation that we need, or provide us with the heroes, the presidents and leaders, the monuments and museums which we erect to them in the name of PEACE.

The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something.

Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.

As they prepared themselves to go ashore no one doubted in theory that at least a certain percentage of them would remain on the island dead, once they set foot on it. But no one expected to be one of these. Still it was an awesome thought and as the first contingents came struggling up on deck in full gear to form up, all eyes instinctively sought out immediately this island where they were to be put, and left, and which might possibly turn out to be a friend's grave.

He had not the makings of that honest man to whom success comes naturally.

A man loves a thing. That don't mean it's gotta love him back.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair To Maternity . It would probly be a very long book. Whores did not produce as fast as rabbits.

Weary looked at him and shook his head and put the tailgate up and drove down the gravel towards the bivouac, carrying two drunks, who both fatuously imagined, that once in a dream somewhere, sometime, someplace, they had managed for a moment to touch another human soul and understand it.

I write to reach eternity

I think that a classic style in writing tends to remove the reader one level from the immediacy of the experience. For any normal reader, I think a colloquial style makes him feel more as though he is within the action, instead of just reading about it.

If I never meet you In this life Let me feel the lack A glance from your eyes Then my life Will be yours

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.

I don't think people like to read about themselves or about others as they really are. It would be too horrifying.