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Herman Wouk Quotes

Herman Wouk is an American author. His 1951 novel The Caine Mutiny won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His other works include The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, historical novels about World War II, and non-fiction such as This Is My God, a popular explanation of Judaism from a Modern Orthodox perspective, written for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. His books have been translated into 27 languages. The Washington Post called Wouk, who cherishes his privacy, “the reclusive dean of American historical novelists.” Historians, novelists, publishers, and critics who gathered at the Library of Congress in 1995 to mark Wouk's 80th birthday likened him to "an American Tolstoy."

Wouk's latest book, which he says will be his last, is an autobiographical memoir entitled Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author, and it was released in January 2016 to mark his 100th birthday. NPR called it "a lovely coda to the career of a man who made American literature a kinder, smarter, better place."

✵ 27. May 1915 – 17. May 2019   •   Other names Герман Воук, هرمان ووک
Herman Wouk photo

Works

The Winds of War
The Winds of War
Herman Wouk
The Caine Mutiny
The Caine Mutiny
Herman Wouk
Herman Wouk: 12   quotes 0   likes

Famous Herman Wouk Quotes

“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 book The Winds of War

Source: The Winds of War

“This life is slow suicide, unless you read.”

Herman Wouk book The Caine Mutiny

Source: The Caine Mutiny

“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

On his return to Orthodox Judaism.
Time Magazine (September 5, 1955).

“This is an excellent martini—sort of tastes like it isn’t there at all, just a cold cloud.”

Herman Wouk

The Winds of War teleplay, for the ABC miniseries based on the novel (September 10, 1986)).

Herman Wouk Quotes

“You can know almost anything about G-d, provided you put the right questions to Him. You have to learn how to put the questions, and they have to be accurate and airtight. […] [M]y father, for instance, doesn't know that two atoms of hydrogen bind with one atom of oxygen to form a water molecule. Yet it's G-d's truth, and an important one. You don't know it […] you believe it because you read it somewhere, or a teacher told you. I know it. I've put the question, and He answered, straight out. G-d will answer a high school boy. He asks only that you use common sense, pay very close attention to Him, not be sloppy, and count and measure correctly. G-d ignores sloppy questions. Sloppiness is the opposite of G-dliness. G-d is exact. He is marvelously, purely exact. Theology is all slop. Moses gave the best answers you could get, three thousand years ago, and he was no theologian.”

Herman Wouk

"Inside, Outside", p. 567 of the hardcover edition. The quote is fictional physicist Mark Herz answering the protagonist's question "What can you know about G-d? You either believe or you don't."

Truth , School , Quotes , Boy

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

Herman Wouk

Book-of-the-Month Club News (May 1985).

“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

On Genesis I as his favorite opening passage.
New York Times (June 2, 1985).

“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

“An Exclusive Interview with Herman Wouk,” Kirk Polking, Writer’s Digest (September 1966).

Life , Truth , Art , Imagination

“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

This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (1959)

Housing

“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

This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (1959)

Children , Health , Feeling , Heart

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