Gerald Scarfe Quotes

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

Doesn't it strike you as queer that I, who couldn't cut the head off a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me.

I was born and raised in war.

I was forced to be political because I had bombs falling on me as a child in Tehran.

No place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a women and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death!

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

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

Whenever I look at pictures of horrific things that soldiers do or that have been done to soldiers I always feel sorry for everybody involved because politics throws them into these horrific situations where really it's just 18-year-old kids.

There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking - well - I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on.

When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

I was what? - twelve years old - and I was thrown in the cells with these people, so I learned fast.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

I have been through two wars in my 24 years, and I know what it's like to be without anything, to see the bombs flying above your head.

I woke up and all I could see was Iraqis standing all around me, looking down upon me. I knew at that moment something terrible had happened and I wasn't in the right place.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

I think we were trying to get off Combat from the moment we were on Combat.

War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.

There's no such thing as a crowded battlefield. Battlefields are lonely places.

One of the reasons it's important for me to write about war is I really think that the concept of war, the specifics of war, the nature of war, the ethical ambiguities of war, are introduced too late to children. I think they can hear them, understand them, know about them, at a much younger age without being scared to death by the stories.

I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.

I have fought for many years. I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die.