Top 38 Quotes & Sayings by Herman Wouk

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

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

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

Write a page a day. It will add up.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.

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

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.

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

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

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.

... a war always ends.

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.

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.

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.

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

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.