Adam Mansbach Quotes

My first encounter with science fiction was reading the work of H.G. Wells when I was nine or ten, and I don't believe 'The War of the Worlds' or 'The Time Machine' have ever been bettered. Plus, I have always had a liking for Victorian and Edwardian clothes and contraptions, which tends to color the worlds I dream up.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I think it's a lot easier to tell a war story about two sides of a conflict with one another as opposed to one side in conflict with itself.

The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.

A great war shall burst forth from fishes of steel. Machines of flying fire, lobsters, grasshoppers, mosquitoes. The mass attacks shall be repulsed in the woods, when no child in Germany shall obey any longer.

It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.

Can you look forward to the future of our country and imagine any state of things in which, with slavery still existing, we should be assured of permanent peace? I cannot.

'The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.'

Flashback in film rarely works.

A true war story is never moral.

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is very much a sequel, a continuation of the story about Eastern Europe emerging from war and Communism. The notion of presenting history as a story also appealed to me very much, since that is the way I look at the events I cover as a reporter.

Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around.

I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.

Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.

To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.

I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as 'The Battle of Dorking' from 1871 showed how SF's trademark 'what if' scenarios could easily encompass warfare.

I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That's why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it's a tool, not an end to itself.

If you ask the people in Europe who won World War II, they don't say the Allies; they say the United States won the war and saved the world.

The bones of the story of 'War Horse' is a love story. That's what makes it universal.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks!