Stephen Hunter Quotes

The new book is a result of my well-documented ... absorption in Samurai movie culture. It's called 'The 47th Samurai: A Bob Lee Swagger novel,' and it takes Bob to Japan in search of the sword his father recovered on Iwo that has gone missing under extremely violent circumstances.

As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.

You know that easy money, stupid people, and hard times have a way of creating misery. Your

Now, I am about to be nailed as the man who disliked 'Howl's Moving Castle.' Lord, give me strength! Also, IT, please disconnect the e-mail thing.

If you have only 95 minutes of material, make an only 95-minute movie. Amazing how often that's forgotten.

By the '50s and '60s, war movies had become big and impersonal. They almost never bothered to characterize the Japanese enemy as particularly evil; in fact, they never bothered to characterize him at all.

That is why heroes are always so tragic, in the end. They are alone.

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man. - Peter Townsend, "Behind Blue Eyes

he was a man of politics and a man of action.

For me, as an actor, just to keep acting and to keep being able to work and to do different roles and challenging roles, that's something I'd love to do.

Since I'm a story-oriented critic, sometimes it's difficult to discuss issues without defining them. At the same time, I try not to give away anything that hasn't been given away in first half, in TV commercials, or that isn't obvious from the set-up of the movie. My editors are aware of this tendency of mine and read carefully for spoilers.

The Japanese, despite the trade deficit and their ability to build fabulous automobiles, still think that a guy in a monster suit is all that is needed for a monster movie.

I've actually published two compilations, if only barely. Hire a private detective and possibly you'll be able to locate them. One was called 'Violent Screen,' and the other 'Now Playing at the Valencia.' Bantam and Simon and Schuster.

I never feel so utterly fraudulent as when I review a movie whose charms impress all in the world and I simply do not get it. The other variant is that I love something the world disdains. This has had severe career consequences: I am still famous - or notorious - in certain quarters where I am recalled as the man who liked 'Hudson Hawk.'

The Americans, he laughed drunkenly. They build more cars than anybody in the world, and take them out and dump them in terrible traffic jams. The only thing crazier than the Americans were the Russians, who never had traffic jams because they didn't have cars.

knowing that he himself looked so cowboylike to these Eastern people, in his best black Tony Lamas, a nice pair of Levi's, a pointed-collar shirt with string tie and a black Stetson, all under a sheepskin coat, his best coat.

I was in a delirium of destruction, as if the body were an insult to the philosophy of my life, and only in destroying it could I reclaim my sanity.

Because I'm too old for tragedy. I like a nice happy ending too.

Considered purely as effects-driven filmed drama, 'The Day After Tomorrow' checks in somewhere in the middle of one of Hollywood's most absurd and least lamented dead genres, the disaster pic of the '70s. It's a little better than 'Earthquake' but not as good as 'The Towering Inferno,' because it doesn't star Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.

The true mystery of the JFK assassination isn't 'How could the bullet go through two people with only slight damage?' but 'Why did the third bullet explode?'

That's the bravest thing, I think: not to be brave for yourself but for a buddy when it gets you nothing and costs you everything.

Within an ensemble, like in sports, if you do your little job, it makes everybody look good.

I remember the early 1980s, when I first got one of these fabulous film critic jobs. The downside was sitting through 'Splatteria III: The Dismembering of the Clampett Clan' or 'The Oklahoma Meatgrinder Massacre' or some such. The headaches unleashed by watching attractive kids die week after week after week cannot be imagined.

There is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best - that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror. - Norman Mailer's introduction to In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott No one knows what it's like to be the bad man.

Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar's own figuring, hardly human at all.

As I said, the good die young, and the motherfuckers go on forever, pardon my French.

The prospects for a coherent, hilarious and consistent American comedy seem to lessen every year, as the poor waterlogged, gassy corpse called 'Evan Almighty' proved when it floated ashore recently. So there's a temptation to think too highly of Robin Williams's uneven but occasionally funny 'License to Wed.'

Having a better and more productive life than my monster father has been my most significant accomplishment.

Charles checked on his two snitches among the subversives. There were bascially two subversive groups in Blue Eye -Communists and Republicans, - and Charles confirmed quickly that neither had any revolutions planned

The worst moment was always taps. It didn't matter if the bugler played it well or poorly, in tune or out; there was something in the mournful ache of the music, and how it spoke of men dying before their time for something they only vaguely understood and being only vaguely appreciated by the people on whose behalf they died, that made it hurt so much.

They were eyes made for laughter, but not raucous yuks; rather, for the laughter of wit, of erudition, of the bon mot.

I'd like to do a bit of comedy.