Leslie Cockburn Quotes

In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash.

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.

We don't know what may yet happen to us, what military and political defeats we may yet have to face.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

A true war story is never moral.

When I was first sent from H.M.S. King Alfred to be interviewed by Goodeve in the Admiralty, I was furious. The War seemed to me, in June of 1940, to be desperately serious, and England in imminent peril of invasion.

Life feels more vivid in a conflict zone. It is clear what matters, and who you can count on, for what.

I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.

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.

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.

There can be no peace with someone who wants to kill you.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

The chief incalculable in war is the human will.

People don't seem to understand that it's a damn war out there.

Alfred Nobel's discoveries are characteristic; powerful explosives can help men perform admirable tasks. They are also a means to terrible destruction in the hands of the great criminals who lead peoples to war.

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

I always tell people, anger is like liquid. It's fluid, it's like water. You put it in a container and it takes the shape of that container. So many people you see in prison, unleashing war on their people, they are angry, and they take their anger and put it into a violent container.

I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war.

We were then in a dangerous, helpless situation, exposed daily to perils and death amongst savages and wild beasts, not a white man in the country but ourselves.

I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times, and I just go, 'Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that.'

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.

I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.

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.