Gary Brecher Quotes

“1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.5. “Hearts and minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: “My gang yeah, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.”

“1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.5. “Hearts and minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: “My gang yeah, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.”

“War is just demographics in a hurry.”

“There's no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We're all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy -- what a sweetheart of a count and of a writer -- in the 1860's he wanted to write about the Napoleonic Campaign, about 1812. If you write about 1812 in 1860, a horse is still a horse. A carriage is still a carriage. Obviously, there are been some technological advancements, et cetera, but you don't have to worry about explaining the next killer [iPhone] app or the next Facebook because right now things are happening so quickly. ("Gary Shteyngart: Finding 'Love' In A Dismal Future", NPR interview, August 2, 2010)”

“How would you feel about sharing your bed?" she asked. Tristan blinked. "Excuse me?" "He'd love to!" Gary said. Tristan shot him a look, "Good," said Ivy, failing to notice Gary's wink. "Ella can be a pillow hog, but all you have to do is roll over her.”

“But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces [become] what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made or parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in.”

“Eventually you will come to understand that love heals everything, and love is all there is.”

“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”

“All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.”

“I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.”

“I believe it was the great ogre philosopher Gary who observed that complexity is, generally speaking, an illusion of conscious desire. All things exist in as simple a form as necessity dictates. When a thing is labeled 'complex,' that's just a roundabout way of saying you're not observant enough to understand it.”