56 Quotes by Paul Fussell

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

The more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.

The worst thing about war was the sitting around and wondering what you were doing morally.

We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.

The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.

What someone doesn't want you to publish is journalism; all else is publicity.

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.