Martha Gellhorn Quotes

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

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

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war.

Ignorance is a menace to peace.

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.

I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.

We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.

I don't think they knew very much about the war in Korea at all.

And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.

After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.

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.

When I was growing up, everybody in charge, my parents and teachers, had all survived the war, and they talked about the war like it was the Kraken - you know, this huge beast that roamed the earth during their formative years.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

On our plane knowledge and ignorance are the immemorial adversaries.

Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.

These are challenging times for all Americans. We face the specter of war abroad and a steady stream of bad economic news at home.

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.