Gerald Scarfe Quotes

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'

When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, I was shooting a farmer in a field - just a pastoral scene. And while I was shooting him, an explosion occurred right - he blew up right in my lens, so to speak. And he had stepped on a landmine.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

I don't go to war for the adrenaline rush. I cover wars because that's what I've ended up doing.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

After four or five different wars, I grew weary of that work, partly because in an open war, open to coverage, as Vietnam was, it's not that difficult, really.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.

Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.

Journalists dedicate their lives to covering war - they make many personal sacrifices, and it's not something that's gender-based. In a place like Libya where there's heavy fighting, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.

I was not able to stop or slow down the Vietnam War.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

I hope my own children never have to fight a war.

Word War III is about to start and we cannot change the position on Vietnam.

The Russians feared Ike [Eisenhower, in Korea]. They didn't fear me [in Vietnam].

The sad reality of war is that if you are going to be in day-to-day combat, there are going to be casualties.

I'm not a war reporter.

I was a war correspondent and journalist for a long time, and I was very near the towers on 9/11 and very shortly after in Afghanistan.

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.

Sure Vietnam is a dirty war. I've never heard of a clean one.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

If you've got a camera, go to a war zone and tell a story.

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