Herman Wouk Quotations

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.

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

Write a page a day. It will add up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

... a war always ends.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.

... talk, not sex, constitutes most of the intercourse between a man and his wife.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.

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.

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.

The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.

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