John Hersey Quotes

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

The second stage set in ten or fifteen days after the bombing. The main symptom was falling hair. Diarrhoea and fever, which in some cases went as high as 106, came next.

The final test of a work of art is not whether it has beauty, but whether it has power.

Events are less important than our responses to them.

It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

The reality is that changes are coming... They must come. You must share in bringing them.

The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.

To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.

My two major faults are that I row too long and pick up too many women

I thought of God as being able to talk big and write *very* small.

Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

The reality is that changes are coming. ... They must come. You must share in bringing them.

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.

The price one pays for having a kind man at one’s elbow.