Max Brooks Quotations

I think 'G.I. Joe' is a perfect example of how I'm the world's worst businessman. If I were smart, I'd be writing 'World War Z Part 12', but I have to go where the muse leads, and I've always been a huge 'G.I. Joe' fan. I always wanted to know more about these characters, these little plastic figures I played with as a kid.

Zombies are so popular. There's a lot of chaff out there. For every one person who is legitimately passionate about zombies, there are a hundred people who are thinking, 'Hey, I can make a buck off of this.' The problem is that some of their stuff is so lame.

Zombies are apocalyptic. I think that's why people love them because we're living in, not apocalyptic times, but I think we're living in fear of the apocalyptic times.

Organize before they rise!

To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.

There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.

They didn't break me. I broke myself.

Survival is the key word to remember—not victory, not conquest, just survival.

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe...Turn on the TV...What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.

The highest distinction is service to others.

I wrote 'The Zombie Survival Guide' because I wanted to read it, and nobody else was writing it. All I've been doing with everything I've written is answering questions that I had.

Zombie books were going to be my passion projects, but certainly not pay the bills. I thought I was going to have to get a real job on a sitcom or something, and have my zombie books to remind myself I was still a writer at heart. I never thought I could actually pay my bills and write what I wanted.

Before I'm a zombie nerd, before I'm a science-fiction nerd, I am a history nerd.

The bottom line is I'm a slow zombie guy - I'm always a slow zombie guy but I also know I'm in the minority.

The dead walk among us. Zombies, ghouls-no matter what their label-these somnambulists are the greatest threat to humanity, other than humanity itself.

A true crisis. Class 3 outbreaks, more than any other, demonstrate the clear threat posed by the living dead. Zombies will number in the thousands, encompassing an area of several hundred miles.

Of all the weapons discussed in this book, nothing is more important than your primary firearm. Keep it cleaned, keep it oiled, keep it loaded, keep it close. With a cool head, steady hand, and plenty of ammunition, one human is more than a match for an army of zombies.

...because I'm sure that as soon as things really get back to "normal," once our kids or grandkids grow up in a peaceful and comfortable world, they'll probably go right back to being as selfish and narrow-minded and generally shitty to one another as we were.

After all we'd been through, we still couldn't take our heads from out of our asses or our hands from around each other's throats.

If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.

Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.

Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.

I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.

Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.

Zombies will try to scale any surface no matter how unfeasable or even impossible. In all but the easiest situations, these attempts have met with failure. Even in the case of ladders, when simple hand-over-hand coordination is required, only one in four zombies will succeed.

There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.

. . . show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay.

1. Organize before they rise! 2. They feel no fear, why should you? 3. Use your head: cut off theirs. 4. Blades don't need reloading. 5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair. 6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it. 7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike. 8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert! 9. No place is safe, only safer. 10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

They were viewed very much like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls.

They say great times make great men. I don't buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. [...] I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.

Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.

Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.

With so much protection, wouldn't one be able to wander among the undead ranks, taunting them at will with no danger of repercussion?

Zombies are apocalyptic in nature. They belong to a class of monster that doesn't just hunt humans, but seeks to obliterate that entire human race.

But there were alternative media outlets. Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those elitist eggheads shouted "The Dead Are Walking," the more most real Americans tuned them out.

Can you ever “solve” poverty? Can you ever “solve” crime? Can you ever “solve” disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.

When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.

You assume things, like whatever country has more firepower wins the wars, and that's actually not true at all.

Zombies don't run. They don't dance. They don't say, "More brains." There is no Thriller Night. Those are stereotypes that are perpetrated by Hollywood, which I think is very irresponsible because it can get you killed.

Any survival guide will tell you, don't buy a pair of combat boots before any disaster. They'll tear your feet up. Or water - don't bring water with you because it'll tire you out and you'll lose too much fluid. Bring a water pump.

I think 'G.I. Joe' is a perfect example of how I'm the world's worst businessman. If I were smart, I'd be writing 'World War Z Part 12', but I have to go where the muse leads, and I've always been a huge 'G.I. Joe' fan. I always wanted to know more about these characters, these little plastic figures I played with as a kid.

I think the fascination with zombies is that they don't obey the rules of monsters. The first rule of monsters is that you have to go find them. You have to make a conscious choice to go to the swamp or the desert or the abandoned summer camp.

I think the general anxiety of the 1960s - '70s spawned our interest in the living dead. When people worry about the end of their world, they need a safe vessel for all their fears. Zombies provide that vessel because they're 'safe.

I wanted to serve. It was Desert Storm. I thought, 'I was a rich kid, and America's been good to me.

I think Americans are at our best when we recover from a crisis. We've suffered some blows that other countries would have never recovered from.

I remember I used to come up to my teacher crying because I couldn't read. She would say: 'You can do this. You just don't want to do this.

I'm not a horror fan. I'm an anti-horror fan. I think horror fans feel deep down in the pit of their souls, they feel safe, and therefore bored. And therefore they want to be scared.

Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation.

Looking for love on the internet is like Janet Leigh asking Norman Bates if he likes her body.

Zombies let us explore notions of the apocalypse - no water, food, medical care, the government imploding - while letting us sleep at night.

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget.

I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.

I don't mind my work being a record of the time it was written in.

Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down.

When I read Frank Miller's 'The Dark Knight Returns', I think it's a wonderful record of the Reagan era. I think it's amazing. This is the time I lived in.

The dead walk among us.

When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was 'Hunt for Red October' by Tom Clancy.

We've been at peace about as long as e were at war.

I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.

During the Qin Dynasty, all books not relating to practical concerns such as agriculture or construction were ordered burned by the emperor to guard against "dangerous thought." Whether accounts of zombie attacks perished in the flames will never be known. This obscure section of a medical manuscript, preserved in the wall of an executed Chinese scholar, might be proof of such attacks.

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.

You can watch 'Dawn of the Dead' and still sleep at night. Try that with 'The Day After'.

Zombies have no memories of their former life. You wont see the undead trying to wash windows or do your taxes. All they know how to do is swarm and feed.

Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.

If I knew anything about what people wanted and was popular, I'd still be writing for 'Saturday Night Live'. I can only write what I want, and hopefully people will like it.

You can't blame anyone else... You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That's why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We'd all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we'd done behind us. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoulder the weight." - Philip Adler

But no matter what happens to the surviving humans, there will always be the walking dead.

If you believe you can accomplish everything by "cramming" at the eleventh hour, by all means, don't lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining

Use your head; cut off theirs.

Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent thinking clearly is never time wasted.

America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t uncontested, it was positively devastating.

Whatever bro, tell it to the whales

We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z

When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no.

There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.

[...]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.

Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.

Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.

We live in such a service-based, globalised economy where very few people actually make anything and the people who do make stuff... it's all part of a massive global supply chain. So what if all those chains were suddenly cut, how would you make something? How would you keep people alive? And that was something I wanted to explore.

Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.

You can't blame anyone else, ... , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

Hooking on scuba gear and blindly diving into zombie-infested water is a wonderful way to mix the two childhood terrors of being eaten and drowning.

The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts

That's the thing about zombies. They don't adapt and they don't think. Literally, you could have a zombie on one side of a chain link fence and you could be on the other side and they could be trying to get to you and six feet down could be an open door and they will not go through that door in the fence. That's why they're so scary.

My coping mechanism with my dyslexia is to use wit and humor.

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.