Howard Fast Quotations

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.

A man who will traduce those who stood with him in battle is not worth much.

I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.

I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

Like most thoughtful people who watch what's going on in Washington, venting is very necessary.

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror.

After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.

I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.

I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.

Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life.

To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.

In L.A., you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you're cheating on your wife.

Most assuredly Zen is a religion, but it is a religion without scripture, without doctrine or dogma and without sin.

And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens.

Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance-whatever

Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.

Either you get a chance to be a kid when you are a kid, or you don't grow up.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

The dignity is in the worker, not in the job.

I am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered]