Anthony Swofford Quotations

Right now in American writing there is no genre as exciting as memoir - the writer can do anything, as long as it works. It's like the 1920s up in this joint. So, I'd say, experiment with how you tell the story. In the best memoir it's not the what, it's how the writer tells the what - meaning and effect through form.

It occured to me that we will never be young again.

My combat action has commenced... I've pissed my pants, but only a little.

If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.

My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.

I think the combatant is always burdened with returning and making his way through his past. And that we as citizens have a responsibility to those guys upon return. We have to make some kind of an attempt to understand what their life is like.

Every war is different. Every war is the same.

It dosnt matter how many mr. and mrs. johnsons are anti war- the actuall killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

A story: A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the rifle.

I was a guy, sitting alone in a room in Portland, just wanting to tell people what it's like to be in a war, even if it lasts just four days. Especially if it lasts just four days.