Geoffrey West Quotes

A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes the stimulus can be an idea, which will rapidly clothe itself in character and incident. 'Foreign Bodies' came about through the contemplation of the contrast between post-second world war America and Europe.

I often compare myself as a kid to my own grandchildren, who are around 11 and 14 now. That's the age kids usually read my book. And I remember myself; we'd gone through a world war. My father was an army officer so I was aware of what was going on. But I wasn't bombarded with images of catastrophe like many kids are today.

East Asia has prospered since the end of the Vietnam War, and Northeast Asia has prospered since the end of the Korean War in a way that seems unimaginable when you think of the history of the first half of the century.

If Roosevelt didn't have World War II, he never would have had a third term.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

I was born in 1954. My parents were brought up in the war years, and life was hard.

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

Americans, we passionately believe, are a humane people. We showed that in restoring wounded economies abroad after World War II, even those of our enemies, Germany and Japan.

When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.

Looking back, I'm almost happy I lost that fight. Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal.

And then I went to the University of New Hampshire for two years, and then the war came along.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.

It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures... I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with 'Once upon a time.'

Remember, we know the end of the story of World War II and the Cold War. But day by day, living in fear of the Nazis and then in fear of the Soviets, the outcome was by no means certain.

You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.

I'm a Bristol person too, I lived in Bristol during the war.

When I left to go into apprenticeship in 1949, it was only four years after the war, and people don't realize, we still had tickets for butter, meat and so forth in France until 1947. It's not like the end of the war, everything was plentiful - it wasn't.

They really do a disservice because these men and women came out of the Depression, they came out of the war.

When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound.

In 1949, I saw a World War II veteran named Lou Brissie, who had nearly lost a lower leg in combat, pitch in the All-Star Game in Brooklyn.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

The family ties between hundreds of thousands of German families and their American relatives led many to think that America would never join a second war against Germany.