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James Jones — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Notable quotes

“This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and they feed you like hogs.”
— Letter after joining the Army (1939), quoted by Peggy Noonan in "From 'Eternity' to Here" in The Wall Street Journal (25 May 2006)
“I want to make everybody in the world groan with the inevitability of sorrow.”
— As quoted in Into Eternity : The Life of James Jones, American Writer (1985) by Frank MacShane, p. 305
“When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.”
— First line. "Jones packs a hell of a lot into that first line. He tells you it's summer, he tells you it's morning, he tells you you're on an Army post with a soldier who's obviously leaving for someplace, and he gives you a thumbnail description of his hero. That's a good opening line." ~ Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) in Killer's Payoff (1958)
“There's only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.”
— "Old midwestern saying" created by Jones for his story, as stated in James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master (1998) by Steven R. Carter
“I'm really serious about this writing thing. What time I haven't been writing, I've been reading: Thomas Wolfe, if you know who he is. His writing is mostly built about the central character of a writer, himself. Altho it's fiction, it deals with his life and experiences. In my opinion, little as it's worth, he is the greatest writer that has lived, Shakespeare included. He is a genius.”
— Letter to his brother Jeff, from Hawaii (7 April 1941); p. 11
“I have discovered only two writers whom I can take all the way, or at least nearly so; and those are Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe. I think Hemingway is confused on lots of things, just as I think the Fountainhead was confused; but I also think both are magnificently right in many things.)”
— Letter to Maxwell Perkins (21 October 1946); p. 77

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.