War Narrative Quotes

What we're doing with Band of Brothers is trying to put it into human terms, so it is not just a flickering, black and white myth on a screen, it is a resonant story. I want the audience to recognize themselves in these men. They're not just mythic heroes.

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.

History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their view. Or, at any rate, the victors' version is given prominence and holds the field.

Hollywood continues to present the U.S. Army as being the good guys, always defeating the aliens or foreigners.

The constant refrain that bringing our troops home would demonstrate a lack of support for them must be one of the most amazing distortions ever foisted on the American public.

When you make a war movie, the other side has to be the enemy. You're making a war movie from the point of view of a soldier fighting it.

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

To sing of Wars, of Captains, and of Kings/Of Cities founded, Common-wealths begun/For my mean Pen are too superior things.

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 bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.

The lucidity of the battle narratives, the vigor of the prose, the strong feeling for the men from generals to privates who did the fighting, are all controlled by a constant sense of how it happened and what it was all about. Foote has the novelist's feeling for character and situation, without losing the historian's scrupulous regard for recorded fact. The Civil War is likely to stand unequalled.

Any story you write about war, or film you make about war, is bound to be political whether you like it or not.

I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.

I tried to render the Afghan war as much as I could fro the perspective of the Afghans. I have served as an advisor to Afghan troops, and much of my war experience was seen through the lens of fighting that war alongside Afghan soldiers.

The reason that 'Stalingrad' took off was because it emphasized the influence of history on the individual.

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

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

I mean, it [Southern Comfort] is basically a story about the folly of our misadventure into that war, done in the context of these National Guard weekend warriors who wander into a world about which they know nothing and then wind up wreaking havoc on themselves.

The White House Iraq Group–WHIG–was set up ... to coordinate the marketing of the [Iraq] war ...

I had wanted to make a film about World War II for some time, but I didn't really want to do something that was set in the trenches, so to speak.

'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.

Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

Muslim communities are the ones that going to see radicalization happening at a mosque or hear it in the community or even among their own family members. And the other part is that there is a narrative that ISIS and other jihadists pose that this is a war between Muslims and the rest of the world.

There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.