I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject – the difference between actuality and representation – was an interesting one. And that’s what brought me to literature in the first place.

— Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell Quotes

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

— Paul Fussell

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

— Paul Fussell

The balls used in top class games are generally smaller than those used in others.

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

— Paul Fussell

If the term discussion has always seemed to me to imply mild warnings of wasted time, workshop sets off a clangorous alarm.

— Paul Fussell

If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries.

— Paul Fussell

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

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

— Paul Fussell

Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys.

— Paul Fussell

There is no Apocalypse.

— Paul Fussell

Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience.

— Paul Fussell

I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals.

— Paul Fussell

I would read accounts of so-called battles I had been in, and they had no relation whatever to what had happened. So I began to perceive that anything written was fiction to various degrees. The whole subject – the difference between actuality and representation – was an interesting one. And that’s what brought me to literature in the first place.

— Paul Fussell

Two motives urge fans to obsession with their sports. One is the need- – through the appeal of vicarious success – -to identify with winners. The other is to sanction, through pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship, a claim to expertise on the subject. Sports give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore and to watch innumerable commentators on TV do the same.

— Paul Fussell

Happy are those who can relieve suffering with prayer Happy those who can rely on God to see them through. They can wait patiently for the end. But we who have put our faith in the goodness of man and now see man’s image debas’d lower than the wolf or the hog – Where can we turn for consolation? Owen.

— Paul Fussell
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