Max Brooks Quotes

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.

My coping mechanism with my dyslexia is to use wit and humor.

That's the thing about zombies. They don't adapt and they don't think. Literally, you could have a zombie on one side of a chain link fence and you could be on the other side and they could be trying to get to you and six feet down could be an open door and they will not go through that door in the fence. That's why they're so scary.

You can't blame anyone else, ... , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

If you believe you can accomplish everything by "cramming" at the eleventh hour, by all means, don't lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining

Hooking on scuba gear and blindly diving into zombie-infested water is a wonderful way to mix the two childhood terrors of being eaten and drowning.

Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.

You can't blame anyone else... You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That's why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We'd all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we'd done behind us. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoulder the weight." - Philip Adler

There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.

Zombies let us explore notions of the apocalypse - no water, food, medical care, the government imploding - while letting us sleep at night.

The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe...Turn on the TV...What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products.

We live in such a service-based, globalised economy where very few people actually make anything and the people who do make stuff... it's all part of a massive global supply chain. So what if all those chains were suddenly cut, how would you make something? How would you keep people alive? And that was something I wanted to explore.

But no matter what happens to the surviving humans, there will always be the walking dead.

Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent thinking clearly is never time wasted.

Whatever bro, tell it to the whales

Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.

Use your head; cut off theirs.

Zombies will try to scale any surface no matter how unfeasable or even impossible. In all but the easiest situations, these attempts have met with failure. Even in the case of ladders, when simple hand-over-hand coordination is required, only one in four zombies will succeed.

Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.

Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down.

1. Organize before they rise! 2. They feel no fear, why should you? 3. Use your head: cut off theirs. 4. Blades don't need reloading. 5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair. 6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it. 7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike. 8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert! 9. No place is safe, only safer. 10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

[...]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.

There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.

We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z

Secrecy is a vacuum and nothing fills a vacuum like paranoid speculation.

. . . show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay.

If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.

Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.

Zombies are apocalyptic in nature. They belong to a class of monster that doesn't just hunt humans, but seeks to obliterate that entire human race.

Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.

Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.

To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.

Survival is the key word to remember—not victory, not conquest, just survival.

When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no.

I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.

Can you ever “solve” poverty? Can you ever “solve” crime? Can you ever “solve” disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.

Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.

The dead walk among us.

Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess.

With so much protection, wouldn't one be able to wander among the undead ranks, taunting them at will with no danger of repercussion?

Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.

America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t uncontested, it was positively devastating.

There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.

I wanted to serve. It was Desert Storm. I thought, 'I was a rich kid, and America's been good to me.

We've been at peace about as long as e were at war.

Of all the weapons discussed in this book, nothing is more important than your primary firearm. Keep it cleaned, keep it oiled, keep it loaded, keep it close. With a cool head, steady hand, and plenty of ammunition, one human is more than a match for an army of zombies.

I'm not a horror fan. I'm an anti-horror fan. I think horror fans feel deep down in the pit of their souls, they feel safe, and therefore bored. And therefore they want to be scared.

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget.