Howard Fast
A man who will traduce those who stood with him in battle is not worth much.
Americans have no sense of history. And not much memory. They don't remember what happened yesterday.
Since I believe that a person's philosophical point of view has little meaning if it is not matched by being and action, I found myself willingly wed to an endless series of unpopular causes, experiences which I feel enriched my writing as much as they depleted other aspects of my life.
I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.
To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.
The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.
Like most thoughtful people who watch what's going on in Washington, venting is very necessary.
I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee.
After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got together: a group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse.
My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.
I always thought that socialism here would be peculiarly American, with some reasonable, post-industrial evolution between working-class needs and market forces. It won't be bloody like the Russian Revolution.
In L.A., you work like hell because there is nothing else to do, unless you're cheating on your wife.
A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.
I'm disenchanted with Communism and most other things. I'm cynical but not a cynic. I'm cynical about TV, Congress, and commercial peanut butter.
The Rosenberg case had been orchestrated to an anti-Communist frenzy that matched the exuberant hysteria of the Nazi horror.
It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.
The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.
I was born and grew up in the greatest, the noblest achievement of the human race on this planet - which was called the United States of America.
I am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered]Collection: Mother
Either you get a chance to be a kid when you are a kid, or you don't grow up.Collection: Growing Up
A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.Collection: Distance
The dignity is in the worker, not in the job.Collection: Inspiring
Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.Collection: People
Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance-whateverCollection: Arrogance
And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens.Collection: Buddhist
Most assuredly Zen is a religion, but it is a religion without scripture, without doctrine or dogma and without sin.Collection: Religion