Quotes About Perspective

My mind-set is Munich. Most of my generation's is Vietnam.

With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.

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.

Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.

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

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

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.

It's because films like 'Selma' are so rarely made that we end up putting them under the microscope. One, maybe two, a year. As a white person, you don't have that. You have the gamut. No one says to Oliver Stone, 'Another film about Vietnam? White characters again?'

Vietnam affected everything in life while it went on. My time in the service made it clear to me that what we were being told in our newspapers and newscasts, back in the States, wasn't half the story of what was really going on.

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 don't judge anybody who chose not to serve during Vietnam, at all. It's a different time, and I don't judge anybody for the decision they made.

My parents are both war veterans; they met in Vietnam. They were involved in a war that they absolutely disagreed with.

Oh yea, I was a conservative. I was probably hard-line, preoccupied with how much money I would make and how far I would go. But I began seeing a lady who directs a homeless clinic in Fargo. One of our first get-togethers was to a Salvation Army dinner, where I met some jobless Vietnam veterans. It started my transition, opened my eyes.

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

I'm not so sure that people consider homelessness to be as important as, say, the Vietnam War. One should never even try to equate them because, of course, they're tragedies on both sides of the coin.

The fact is that the Vietnamese held Americans after 1973.

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.

You remember all those phrases about how 'these people' - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

Style is the perfection of a point of view.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

I'd rather live in a cave with a view of a palace than live in a palace with a view of a cave.

I always have a point of view. It may not be right, but it's my own.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth... I look at everything from this point of view.