Human life cannot be formless. We live by patterns. We move in comradeships. Conformity is evil when it distorts, flattens, and erases fruitful ways, strong ideas, natural identities; it is evil when it is a steamroller. But a man cannot escape being part of a milieu - and a recognizable part - unless he flees naked to a cave, never to return. The sensible thing is to use hard thinking to find the right way to live and then to live that way. What matters is living with dignity, with decency, and without fear.

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.

A writer is nothing but a gray dirt-covered root. The works he sends up into the sunlight are his fruits, and only those are worthy of attention.

I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans.

My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.