Leonard Cohen

I WROTE FOR LOVE

I wrote for love

Then I wrote for money.

With someone like me

it's the same thing.

1975

Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.

Bobby Kennedy

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

William Langewieshe in Vanity Fair

People who criticize Rumsfeld for having miscalculated the numbers have got it wrong. On the one hand, we had more than enough troops to defeat Saddam's army. On the other hand, it's inconceivable that we could have ever had enough troops, at any troop level, to deal with the wakelessness problem in Iraq. You can double, you can triple the number of troops. If you permanently stationed soldiers on every street corner, I suppose that would probably have an effect, but it's inconceivable that we could do this. We saw the same problem in Vietnam. We kept increasing the troop levels, thinking that this would do the trick. The high troop levels probably did slow the defeat that occurred, but it did not affect the ultimate outcome of the war. This is an aspect of fighting guerrilla wars that many Americans seem not to understand. And they need to understand it. There will be times when we will need to intervene in guerrilla wars around the world for our own national interest, but we need to be very aware of the tools we have to work with. There is no point in bringing the wrong tool to a problem. You bring some other tools.

Thorne Anderson, Photographer

I don't know many people who do the work that I do that like the term, war correspondent. From an outsiders point of view that's what I do, but for me, my work is not all about war. ... It's really about what life is like at the Frontiers of American foreign policy. Unfortunately that means it's a war book in today's time, but really I try to report on the human condition. I'm not so interested in just following the heat of battle, in fact I really hate it. I'm not sure what it means to be an adrenaline junkie. I get in very tense situations where I'm been flooded with adrenaline. It can be very dangerous under gun-fire. I've been attacked by crowds of angry people. There's a lot of times when you're facing flight or fight. I don't like it, I actually hate it, I prefer to be calm and collected and observe what's going on around me. When I hear people talk about American Foreign policy in easy and highly sanitised terms, I feel privileged to have a perspective that allows me to cut through that bullshit.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

There is no writer so bad that some critic will not call him great.

Martha Gellhorn

You must not only know how to write. But you have to be privately, personally, sound to the core. Not sane, but sound. If not, it always shows. Slight smell of cheese in the air, and the work gets a limp, rotting, glazed look.

Isaak Babel

If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.