Rory Kinnear Quotes

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5

As wounded men may limp through life, so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades.

I’ve known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that.

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

I was fantasising about my own death, I started thinking what my funeral would be like and what music would be played, I was at that level of insanity.

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?

I think that there are cancers of the body, but I think they are what I would call cancer of the emotional system, too. These are the kind of diseases or illnesses or sicknesses of the emotional system that are as incurable as cancer.

We made connections between the monsters created by war and the monsters he created, the typical outcast that Whale was attracted to, and the monster in himself, that's inside all of us.

But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.

Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

I think sometimes you go through an experience, and you don't feel the impact, especially in a war experience, until way past it.

As we began to read more and more journals of men who had been in the Civil War and then been in the Indian Wars, we realized there was a whole universe of men whose souls had been shattered, whose lives had been utterly destroyed by what they had to do.

I'd describe 'Born to Kill' as a 'study in psychopathy', it's very much in the heads of our main protagonist, Sam, a young boy dealing with dark, twisted psychotic desires. It's also a coming-of-age story.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!

No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

Don't ever go to war. Even if you win, the battle is never over inside you.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

Sweet Jesus, war does terrible things to people.

When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can't handle it. And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn't see in a movie, nobody would believe it.

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it.

Too sick and freaked out not to want a bullet for every passer by, too sick and freaked out to breathe, too sick and freaked out to care, too sick and freaked out to think of anything but the annihilation of my mind and denial of my life. So sick and freaked out that I think everyone is my friend.