George Packer
The way Donald Trump talks about the problems of black Americans as a kind of separate group who are not part of his audience but he's kind of reaching over his audience or behind his audience to black Americans, saying what have you got to lose? As in you might as well join me because the Democrats haven't done anything for you. But joining me means joining this group that already supports me.Collection: Mean
Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam.Collection: Lying
One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.Collection: Country
A genuine approach to budget cutting - knowing exactly what you're cutting and why, and with what real-life consequences - is beyond my competence, and probably beyond the competence of any politician in America.Collection: Real
When I interviewed Paul Bremer in his office he had almost no books on his shelves. He had a couple of management books, like "Leadership" by Rudolph Giuliani . I didn't take it as an encouraging sign.Collection: Couple
I think it's important for Americans to try to understand each other a little better.Collection: Thinking
People in Congress are willing to shut down the entire government or to make it impossible for a Supreme Court nominee to get a hearing or for routine appointments in the executive branch to go unfilled for years because of a hold placed by a senator.Collection: Government
This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.Collection: Easy
Politics should seize the imagination.Collection: Imagination
When you go to Washington and get off at Union Station, as I sometimes do, and see the Capitol building, I get this hopeless feeling that comes over me.Collection: Feelings
American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.Collection: Men
You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.Collection: Ice Water
I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.Collection: War
I am reading "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers and "Redeployment" by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.Collection: War
The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.Collection: War
There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.Collection: Book
I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.Collection: Stress
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .Collection: Goodbye
There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.Collection: Stripes
What goes on in a person's head, what impels them to a political choice, it's a pretty complicated question.Collection: Choices
Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.Collection: Literature
I don't think of Hillary Clinton as a bad choice. She's an uninspiring choice. She is a deeply imperfect choice, largely for reasons of her own tendency to get into a defensive crouch and create greater problems for herself and the rest of us by refusing to have a transparent reckoning.Collection: Thinking