[I]nstead of the usual "Why can't we make movies more like real life?" I think a more pertinent question is "Why can't real life be more like the movies?"

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

All the rest of us - you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa - we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over.

For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

Thoughts are wonderful things, that they can bring two people, so far apart, into harmony and understanding for even a little while.

Somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn't be any of them left alive.