HERMAN WOUK

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

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

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.

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

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 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.

... a war always ends.

Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.

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

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

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