People talked to me in a way I think they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience; they gave me their papers, they gave me their diaries. I found people constantly opening up to me. And I think they did because I had shared that experience with them.

Neil Sheehan

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Neil Sheehan's quotes

Neil Sheehan

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The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.

Neil Sheehan

I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.

Neil Sheehan

At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.

Neil Sheehan

These men were wrongfully rejected, the veterans. The fighting man should never have been blamed for Vietnam.

Neil Sheehan

You remember all those phrases about how "these people" - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese.

Neil Sheehan

Just because you put higher-octane gasoline in your car doesn't mean you can break the speed limit. The speed limit's still 65.

Neil Sheehan

World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.

Neil Sheehan

We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.

Neil Sheehan

We had a military and political leadership at that period which was genuinely deluded.

Neil Sheehan

People talked to me in a way I think they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience; they gave me their papers, they gave me their diaries. I found people constantly opening up to me. And I think they did because I had shared that experience with them.

Neil Sheehan

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

Neil Sheehan

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

Neil Sheehan

We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans.

Neil Sheehan

Americans, particularly after World War II, tended to romanticize war because in World War II our cause was the cause of humanity, and our soldiers brought home glory and victory, and thank God that they did. But it led us to romanticize it to some extent.

Neil Sheehan

The destruction of civilian hamlets, the killing and the wounding of civilians, became vastly greater than it had been before, and it was very upsetting; but I still couldn't bring myself to understand that the policy itself was wrong.

Neil Sheehan

You remember all those phrases about how 'these people' - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese.

Neil Sheehan

Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn't want to do anything that could reflect it.

Walter Salles

Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time.

Tallulah Bankhead

It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.

Tallulah Bankhead

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would be.

Gregg Easterbrook

Dark Water was one of my favourite films to shoot because of Walter. I had seen the previous films he had directed, Central Station and Motorcycle Diaries, and I thought they were great. I really trusted him.

Jennifer Connelly

You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn't play that way. It's about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.

Gael Garcia Bernal

I think I'm going to put together a compilation under Disney's name of my songs that I've done for them - because I've done six or seven by now! The latest was for the Princess Diaries 2 soundtrack. So that's the next thing that's coming out.

Christy Romano

I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.

Paul Westerberg

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.

Ken Burns

Neil Sheehan

I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on... and The Princess Diaries was born!

Meg Cabot

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

Roald Dahl

Over the last two years, I have been able to comb through The Prince's archives. I have been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters.

Jonathan Dimbleby

But the thing I felt most strongly about, and put at the end of one of the prison diaries, was education.

Jeffrey Archer

Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.

Jeffrey Archer

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

Bob Dylan

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

Billy Bob Thornton

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

Franz Kafka

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Alex North

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

Lillian Smith

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Joyce Cary

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

Roger Ascham

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Jimmy Carter

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Roger Ascham

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

John Abizaid

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

Orson Scott Card

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

Martin Sheen

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

Joseph Wambaugh

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Robert Torricelli

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

W. Averell Harriman

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Edmund White

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Eli Wallach