Herman Wouk Quotes

Herman Wouk reflects on tradition, taste and illusion with a thoughtful, plain style.

36 quotes

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

2. The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it-taking the art seriously always, himself never quite-he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now-asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life-can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in.

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

4. We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

5. This is an excellent martini-sort of tastes like it isn't there at all, just a cold cloud.

6. There is a mystery about the Jews : and within this mystery lies the reason for the folk pride of the house of Abraham. This pride exists despite the disabilities that come from many centuries of ostracism.

7. Deep in the heart of both critical Christian and alienated Jew, there is : a feeling, not even a feeling, a shadow of a notion, nothing more substantial than the pointless but compelling impulse to knock on wood when one talks of the health of children-something that says there is more to Jews than meets the eye.

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

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

10. Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

11. Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth.

12. Write a page a day. It will add up.

13. Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don't think so now you will later on, more and more.

14. The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one.

15. The Talmud: Heart's Blood of the Jewish Faith...

16. Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

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

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

19. Discount my partiality, but my report is that so far The Winds of War is looking good.

20. The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, "How would I do this if I were a fool?" Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.

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

22. The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.

23. 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.

24. I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.

25. The Talmud is to this day the circulating heart's blood of the Jewish religion. Whatever laws, customs or ceremonies we observe-whether we are orthodox, conservative, reform or merely spasmodic sentimentalists-we follow the Talmud. It is our common Law.

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

27. I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off.

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

29. Human life cannot be formless. We live by patterns. We move in comradeships. 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. The sensible thing is to use hard thinking to find the right way to live and then to live that way. What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear.

30. Let us fill a cup and drink to that most noble, ridiculous, laughable, sublime figure in our lives... The Young Man Who Was. Let us drink to his dreams, for they were rainbow-colored; to his appetites, for they were strong; to his blunders, for they were huge; to his pains for they were sharp; to his time for it was brief; and to his end, for it was to become one of us.

31. War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

32. My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

33. Strange, isn't it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.

34. A writer is nothing but a gray dirt-covered root. The works he sends up into the sunlight are his fruits, and only those are worthy of attention.

35. This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

36. Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.