Herman Wouk Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

Herman Wouk
Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

Herman Wouk
Deep in the heart of both critical Christian and alienated Jew, there is … a feeling, not even a feeling, a shadow of a notion, nothing more substantial than the pointless but compelling impulse to knock on wood when one talks of the health of children—something that says there is more to Jews than meets the eye.

Herman Wouk
Strange, isn't it, that warfare has come down to fencing with complicated toys that only a few seedy scholars can make or understand.

Herman Wouk
Talk, not sex, constitutes most of the intercourse between a man and his wife.

Herman Wouk
The President has a quick and able mind, though not everybody gives him that, not by a long shot.

Herman Wouk
The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history.

Herman Wouk
Some people think that all the equipment you need to discuss religion is a mouth.

Herman Wouk
My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

Herman Wouk
The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it—taking the art seriously always, himself never quite—he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now—asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life—can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in.

Herman Wouk
The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, "How would I do this if I were a fool?" Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.

Herman Wouk
About the nicest thing God ever invented was alcohol. He's proud of it, too. The Bible's full of kind remarks about booze.

Herman Wouk
Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don't think so now you will later on, more and more.

Herman Wouk
I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it.

Herman Wouk
The only true non-conformists are in the asylums; the only radically free spirits are in the death house awaiting the chair. We live by patterns.

Herman Wouk
Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.

Herman Wouk
He was just head over ears in love, with a young woman as near as his hand and as remote as a star, and for the moment it was enough to be where she was.

Herman Wouk
This is an excellent martini—sort of tastes like it isn't there at all, just a cold cloud.

Herman Wouk
War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

Herman Wouk
I think it's a bit like coming to the end of a book. The plot's in its thickest, all the characters are in a mess, but you can see that there aren't fifty pages left, and you know that the finish can't be far off.

Herman Wouk
We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves.

Herman Wouk
There is a mystery about the Jews … and within this mystery lies the reason for the folk pride of the house of Abraham. This pride exists despite the disabilities that come from many centuries of ostracism.

Herman Wouk