Spanish Civil War Quotes

Some of my earliest political feelings were based on the anti-Japanese bubblegum cards I got. There were also Spanish Civil War bubblegum cards. Awful.

You don’t have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)

[Cesar] Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died.

Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s – the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

When I wrote about the Spanish Civil War many years later, I used documents that I picked up when I was a child, as a lot hadn’t been published (a lot more resources are available now).

The pictures are there, and you just take them.

The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren’t traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.

The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.

The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that’s when I saw him in the mid-1940s.