Quotes About Perspective

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have an unbelievably beautiful, well-known wife. And the people who criticize me don't.

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in - in 2007, we just didn't know it was uncertain. It was - uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn't know it.

The world I want to live in is a world where everybody is a bit more uncertain about their arguments and is a bit more open to other people's arguments. I think that we can engage ideas without ad hominem attacks.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.

In a lot of ways, New York isn't the city I moved to back in 1979. I'm old enough to separate my nostalgia for those days from the reality of how dangerous and uncertain they could be.

It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.

I still believe that even though 'The Empire Strikes Back' is better in innumerable ways than 'Star Wars,' 'Star Wars' wins.

No two wars are identical.

The war, as I felt it and a lot of my compatriots felt it, was a creative act.

Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.

I personally feel like, if you're watching a film about war, you should get a sense of what it's really like.

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

I was born in 1961. Now I think the 16 years that elapsed between 1961 and the end of the wars is nothing. To a child growing up it felt like an eternity, an entirely different world.

In war is it who's right, or who's left?

At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

War is a farmer's son from Kansas trying to kill a factory worker's son from Berlin, with neither of them knowing why.

There is an illusion that has much to do with... most of our unhappiness.... We expect too much.

I don't know if anyone ever 'wins' a war.

War seems a perfectly impossible thing, even when it can be seen coming nearer and nearer.

The poets think about war more than the social scientists.