Geraldine Brooks Quotes

When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side.

I had no desire to go to Iraq. I never wanted to go to Mosul. I'm not a war correspondent. No part of me thrives on the adrenaline or anything like that.

I think war is a dangerous place.

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

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

In Iraq, embedding allows us to put reporters in situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for them.

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

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.

The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.

I think it is rather heroic to go into a war zone where everyone is trying to kill you, and you have no way of shooting back.

I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.

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.

I've covered a couple wars and a lot of breaking news and a lot of cops-and-robbers situations.

My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time.

Here, in Cork district, you have in combination all the dangers which war can inflict.

When I decided to stay in Iraq, I decided to take the fear out of my body and put it into a freezer.

You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint in a war zone, and each is a gamble. The first is to stop and identify yourself as a journalist and hope that you are respected as a neutral observer. The second is to blow past the checkpoint and hope the soldiers guarding it don't open fire on you.

Seen through the eyes of a U.S. soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place.

Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.

There's action only if there is danger.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

In Afghanistan, life is so fragile; who knows what the next week will bring? That fragility really affects the way you're able to report, and the kind of stories people will tell you.

If I was a soldier going to war, I'd be pretty scared the night before a battle. It's a scary thing. And I want my readers to feel that fear as they turn the page.

I had no idea what it would be like to be a bomb tech in Baghdad until I got there so I didn't know what to expect. It was very eye-opening.

I've never been embedded with American soldiers or British soldiers or Iraqi soldiers or any other.