Quotes About Experience

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.

Frankly, I would not have made any difference in Vietnam, but much more is what difference it would have made in me.

Being in Vietnam and being around a major story of the time was always a great shot of adrenaline.

Any of these Vietnam vets that have been there and know the deal, they don't feel that any Hollywood endeavor about the Vietnam era has ever gotten it right yet.

I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.

I did three tours in Vietnam. I guess a total of about almost two years.

I was too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

Experience helped Richard Nixon, but it didn't save him, and it certainly wasn't a blanket endorsement. He blundered terribly in dealing with Vietnam.

I have experienced bad dating and ineptitude with women all across the globe, from Vietnam to Paris. When I was 21, women were an enigma; they were this code that had to be cracked. They were 'The Other.' I have often thought writing this stuff into stand-up and shows would be an exorcism, but it hasn't been; it makes no difference.

I learned long ago on the battlefields of Vietnam that in a crisis, there is no substitute for clear-eyed leadership.

For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling.

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.

My journalistic heroes are all the guys like Peter Arnett of Vietnam, and my style in journalism is you got to stand there, and you got to see it with your own eyes.

My father was a builder. During my high school years, I worked for him. One summer, I was working with a guy who had just come back from Vietnam and had been a tunnel rat. He wouldn't talk about the experience, but it sounded really scary to me.

I only had, like, 4 CDs when I was in college, and one of them was the soundtrack to 'Good Morning Vietnam' - that's how much I don't know about music.

When I was growing up, it was a bad time to be in the military. It was the time of Vietnam, but I was never called up.

I'd love to go to Indonesia, Bali, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

When I was younger, my dad taught me how to cook. He's a genius in the kitchen. I went to Vietnam with my parents, and I went on a cooking course with him.

At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about - or as a ritual like filling up a car - but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.

I grew up around Vietnamese refugees, around people who don't speak English as a first language.

Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support.

People who don't travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what's in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.