
“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”
Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany
Source: Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 42
“The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them.”
Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany
Debating Linus Pauling, in The Nuclear Bomb Tests...Is Fallout Overrated? : Fallout and Disarmament KQED-TV, San Francisco (20 February 1958) http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/peace/papers/1958p2.1.html
Context: I don't want to kill anybody. I am passionately opposed to killing, but I'm even more passionately fond of freedom. The freedom of Dr. Pauling and of myself expressing our opinions freely on any subject, however broad, however far removed of our proper competence, but particularly, to be able to express our opinions in the fields we really know; this would not be possible in Russia.
“I'm not afraid to die; I just don't want to be there when it happens”
“It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.”
" Death (A Play) http://books.google.com/books?id=qjRaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It's+not+that+I'm+afraid+to+die+I+just+don't+want+to+be+there+when+it+happens%22&pg=PA99#v=onepage".
Without Feathers (1975)
I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)
Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 January 1943); p. 28
To Reach Eternity (1989)
Context: I'm going to ask you something. If I do get killed, and I honestly don't see how I can help it, I want you to write that book we were thinking about when I enlisted. If I get it, it's a cinch I won't be able to do it, and it would make me feel a whole lot better to know that if not my name and hand, at least, the thot of me would be passed on and not forgotten entirely. You know, sort of put into the book the promise that I had and the things I might have written so at least the knowledge of talent wasted won't be lost... If I get it, no one will ever know to what heights I might have gone as a writer. Maybe if you wrote about the promise that was there, all wouldn't be lost.
Variant: Writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.