YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Fisk

lines on the record: 50
first: 2006-10-15
most recent: 2006-10-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, when I was at school I learned to play the violin. This sounds like an old cliche, and I used to play an amateur orchestra afterwards. And so probably I'd like to have my I've got my violin. That's in Beirut, actually. I'd like to have it restored and see if I can learn to play again.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mallory's Motartha Because it's the only book that's ever made me cry, and if you read Mallory, it's very interesting that the Knights in Mallory had clearly been on the crusades. I think Mallory might have gone the crusades. He'd certainly talk to people who'd been fighting the Muslims in the Middle East, and at this time I've never been to them. I was at college, I'd never been to the Middle East, and he describes a battle in which an arrow hits him and the pain he feels. And I thought, my goodness, this guy has been in battle. This is a real battle witness from wave fourteenth century, twelfth century.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I've been watching the sea off my balcony for thirty years. I can certainly watch the sea again on the desert island. It won't be bad.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was looking at the monument, and as I walk round you would notice there'd be an Arab name, a Muslim name, and then a Jewish name, and then a Muslim name. And these names on the memorial are of course those citizens of Palestine before it split up into the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, and they fought together with the British against the Nazis. And as I was reading the names, the Israeli delegation, which now comes, of course, Israel didn't exist then, but it comes for the Jewish dead, played this wonderful piece of music the Hatikva, and when I listened to it, I still love this piece of music, I wonder if only the Israeli government could behave with the same dignity and integrity as this piece of music.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it'll surprise you, perhaps it's the Israeli national anthem, the Hatikfah. I first heard it at the battlefield of Alamain, when there was a great commemoration as there is every year on october twenty third, marking the anniversary of the battle Montgomery's victory over Rommel in nineteen forty two.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I certainly did wonder it then. I mean, obviously war should not be the natural state we live in. Oddly enough when you live in a war you never think it's going to end and you start thinking that it is the natural state. And of course when you come to Europe which is an immensely privileged place to live in, I mean how wonderful place Europe is, what a state of the art way of living. I got back to Beirut and sat on my very beautiful apartment balcony with my Bougainville over the edge, and I have my music there too and I thought to myself was this really thirty years of doing this you can't wind the movie back and start again like you can with foreign correspondence and I thought is this really the life I wanted But then again you know I also thought back to when I was offered the job and I remember thinking wow the possibility of being in the Middle East and covering history and I know that I would take the same decision again if I was twenty nine once more I'm not happy I don't enjoy my work at all but I'm passionate about it and I wouldn't want to live in any other”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is Ferreuse, the only great singer for most Lebanese. There are younger ones now that she has the most beautiful Melissa's voice that any Lebanese has ever heard, and throughout the Civil War, and indeed even in the last war this summer, at the worst moments people will play Ferreu's singing Beirut, Beirut with all your flowers, how come you came to smell of smoke and fire?”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt very sorry for her for the suffering she was going through, but having seen so many children dying, I've seen children die as I stood by their bed, with wounds, from bombs, from shells. It wasn't a tragedy in that sense, it wasn't an act of wickedness. Of course what comes to all only children, I'm an only child, when both their parents are dead you say I'm next. But I've been ready for death for a long, long time. I promise you I'm used to the possibility of it. So death as an institution doesn't frankly frighten me.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She didn't go. She didn't go. I think she was tired of him. He was an old man, he was taking a cocktail of drugs from the doctor, and I think he became quite cruel he was threatened to beat her, she said. But I arranged his funeral service, I arranged his favourite hymns, including the twenty third psalm, of course. When I came back to the house afterwards, my mother wanted to hear every detail, and later on as she was dying herself some years later, she told the lady looking after her. She always wanted to stay at home, and she did all her life. She died at home. I was with her when she died. With her I was. And she did tell the lady looking after I was in Afghanistan or somewhere, years later that she missed Bill and wanted to see him again.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I realise the degree to which it was until I was writing my latest book and I actually went right back into his papers and his files and his photographs, and then I began to realise that the influence was enormous. When he died my mother rang up I was in Beirut. I said I didn't go and see him when he was dying. My mother rang me up and said just to let you know your father's died. and there wasn't much to say, and she said, I'm not going to the funeral. I won't go. You look after it. It's a pretty big shock that was.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this goes really back to my dad again, a man who also had very little self doubt, and he would insist every Sunday that we went to All Saints Church in Maidstone for morning matins. I was so bored, but every Sunday morning as he waited for my mother to get dressed for church, he would walk up and down, humming and singing the twenty third Psalm Lord is my shepherdite and I used to think Oh God church again”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think he wanted to make sure I could come back later, probably. Now, don't get romantic about bin Laden. I wasn't valuable to him. Absolutely not. And nor is he valuable to me, by the way. He's just another person to interview. He will live with the rest of the rest of my life because I interviewed him so many times. He's not actually of great interest to me at the moment. I'll tell you why, because he's totally irrelevant. After the atom bomb was made, you could go around arresting all the nuclear scientists and it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference. The bomb was made. Al Qaeda has now been created. He's created the monster. It doesn't matter if he lives or dies.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He got the message I wasn't going to be recruited. I didn't want him to do with it. And at the same time, I didn't offend him and make him look stupid.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't offend him, but I gotta get out of this. And I said No, Sheikh Osama, I am not a Muslim, I am a journalist, and my job is to tell the truth. And he said Ah, this is the same as being a good Muslim. I've got out of it, thank God.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, the third time I saw him I arrived at a tent. And he said Mr Robert, one of our brothers had a dream. And I thought, My God, I don't like this, and he said to me. They saw you coming on a horse dressed as a Muslim imam, and I thought he's reaching out to me. Watch out Fisk. How'd you get out of this? Armed al Qaeda men are sitting round me.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was actually crossing the Atlantic on nine hundred eleven, plane turned round, of course, when America closed its airspace. I remember when I got back and I sat in my hotel room and I watched the twin towers coming down again and again on television, that kind of biblical epic of smoke and fire. I'm looking at the picture of Manhattan. I remember thinking my God, New York is now a shadow of itself.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1997 this time he wanted to see me after nine eleven but I couldn't reach him because of her air raid in Afghanistan but the last words he said to me were sitting outside the tent on a rock and he said Mr Robert from the mountain upon which you're sitting we destroyed the Soviet army and the Soviet Union. A bit of an exaggeration, but there was an element of truth to all this, of course. It was Afghanistan that destroyed the Soviet Union. And he said, and I pray to God that He permits us to turn America into a shadow of itself.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And suddenly in the doorway was Bin Laden standing there in his robes. There he was. That's how I came to him. That's the second time. Third time, rather similar beginning, except this time he was at the top of a mountain in a camp, training camp. The first time I spoke to him he wanted to talk about the Russian war. The second time he wanted to condemn the Saudi royal family for corruption. But this time he was locked onto the west. And it was very, very cold. I slept in the tent.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and there was a truck outside with armed men in a rocket propell grenades. and we set off driving for twenty four hours across the wasteland of Afghanistan. I remember we passed these villages which the Russians had bombed. They were ghost villages and there were naked children crawling through them. And eventually we crossed a stream at night, and on the other side there was a sort of field with trees and lots of military camp beds. armed men lying on them or sitting on them was Al Qaeda, of course, was Al Qaeda. And I was led very politely. I mean, nobody searched me, nobody checked me. We walked through and sat down outside a little hut.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was then as well Oh, I'll tell you how this message came. I got a phone call which I think came from Switzerland saying that the man you met in Sudan would like to see you again, and I knew it was beneath. And I arrived in Afghanistan, checked into the Spingar Hotel in Jalalabad, and I waited and waited day after day and nobody came. And suddenly One evening I was lying on the bed and heard the trees. The window. The classic every book, every window was on the window outside. I was on the ground floor. I said, this is it”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the second meeting came about when he always asked to see me after that. I never asked to see him, and when he did ask to see me, I always made a delay to show him that, you know, I was not going to be summoned by bin Laden. I had other things to do as a Middle East corres”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's really chosen by one Carlos. We were in the same apartment block. I was up and he was down. And he went to get a glass of red wine and said fisky, I want to play something for you. And this is before Pakbal was popular. And he said, Robert, can you imagine that in the seventeenth century amid plague and wars that anyone could write music like this?”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that, you know, I think particularly of my friend Juan Carlos Camuccio, who was a Bolivian born journalist, when all the journalists eventually, all the male journalists left Beirut in eighty six, he stayed on and so did I. And one colour was also, he's a very subversive person. He liked like me challenging authority and making fun of authority. But he was also a very depressive person. Whereas I have my mother's view of the world, I still thought it would get better, however bad it was, and a couple of years ago he was sitting a swim pool. I think it had a few drinks, and he picked up a gun and shot himself. I think what happened is that he was drawn to it like the famous moth to the flame because his sense of depression matched the awfulness of the wars he covered.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad I've avoided that bit anyway. Yes, of course. I don't even smoke actually. If you drink in a war, you'll die. You've got to keep your wits about you. Absolutely, totally. And I think that if you feel... politically passionate about something. You don't fall back on booze and cigarettes, frankly. I don't think you do.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not about forgiveness. This is a war. It's not about forgiveness. This is something that was inevitably going to happen if my car broke down as it did in the wrong place.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because these were people, you know, I wrote at the time, and of course I was attacked for it, if my family, I had a family and children and had been torn to pieces by an American bomber and I saw someone who looked like an American, I'd have done the same as they did. I'd attacked Robert Fisk, of course. Of course I would. We're human beings.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started hitting them. I started bashing them just like in the boy's own paper and I was crying because I hate violence and the last thing I'd ever do is when I hit Muslims in their own country or anybody else's country or anybody and they suddenly fell back about twenty feet and this imam, this religious man I couldn't see him very clear, he had a long gown, took me by the arm and led me away, knowing of course they wouldn't throw stones at him”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was the first Westerner they saw, yes they did. This man came up this huge rock and banged it onto the top of my head, and then everybody else started doing the same thing. Young men were arriving with wolfish smiles. It was a very bad experience of the human being, and I had blood dripping off me, my glasses were smashed into my face, and I remember thinking I wonder how long it takes. And that was the most dangerous thing you can ever think.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I realized I knew Beirut better than he did. I'd been there so long I knew it. I said, My God, I've got away. I've made it. I've got it. I've done it. I've done it. I've actually got away from the bastards.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I was driving down a street called Bliss Street, and it was dark, and the strange thing was that morning I'd been interviewing a Christian who had been held hostage and had been kidnapped. I was actually thinking about the interview and what it was like to suddenly find yourself being kidnapped. And as I was thinking about it, I looked to the left and I saw this car load of gunmen coming up next to me, windows open, waving rifles pointing to the side of the road. And I slowed down I thought I kept saying to myself, This is it, this is it, this is it. And I watched him get in front of me, and I let him get in front of me, and I veered out into the road again, which I wasn't meant to do. And he was chasing me through the streets, and I was hitting park cars, and I thought I was wounded, I thought I'd got blood on me. It was only later, it was just my perspiration, I was fighting at the wheel. And after about a mile.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they were a group of school, as I always call them, of an organization called Amal, Malicious Change, like, you know, chameleons walking over paper.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a throwback to University Days Lancaster. Actually, I lived in Morecambe, which was a much more pleasant place to be than Lancaster because this is the second year of Lancaster University I went there. And I'd sit on the beach in Morecambe. And I was right next to Morecambe Pier. And over and over again, over throughout the day and night as I sat there in the evening, swatting up on linguistics, they would play Donovan's mellow yellow, and it's absolutely synonymous to me of university.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember the first time I saw a man shot it was a British soldier on the back of what we called a pig, it was a big humber armoured vehicle, and then it was and I saw this soldier topple over and over somersaulting out the back and the noise of his rifle as it hit the road, a tremendous crack and I thought my God this is real. This is not a movie Robert. Watch out, watch out. And shortly after that there was a Protestant paramilitary murdered and I walked into this house and there were all these Protestant paramilitaries in brown shirts lust like Hitler brown shirts round the room and his father took me across and took the lid off the coffee and said Look, the poor wee boy feel his hands they broke his fingers and he pulls out this dead hand and sure enough the fingers were broken never touched a dead body before and I looked round and all these brown shirted men were watching like this and I realized my God they were his killers They were the murderers in the room.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there were two things that did first of all was not conflict it was how poor Belfast was. I couldn't believe that a British government could be so shameful as to allow these tens of thousands of people, both Protestants, Catholics, to live in this filth. Belfast was the dirtiest, filthiest, poorest city I'd ever seen in my life at this stage, and when I saw the British Army, which was extremely brutal, I mean there's no doubt about it was, so was the IRA, but I mean I'm talking about the authorities I couldn't believe what I was seeing it was not what I'd been reading about in the newspapers. It was not what I've been seeing on television. That was it.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were the kings of Philip. I saw Lord Beaverbrook walk into the office. Absolutely. We had this big sign across the roof of the newsroom and the express saying, make it quick, make it accurate. I was part of that world. And Arthur Christensen was still alive, the great Daily Express editor. And I saw him, these heroes of journalism, which I've been worshipping for the last five years, they were walking past my desk. I actually had a desk and a telephone that I could use and someone else paid the bill. It was spectacular.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would have been 17. I was about the youngest journalist who'd ever walked the streets of Fleet Street with a pay packet, yeah.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's actually not a piece of music it's the June speech the most defiant speech that Winston Churchill made during the Second World War. And the reason I'm choosing it is partly because of course Winston Churchill's portrait inevitably hung over the living room of my parents' home, but also because over and over again more and more frequently the blares and the bushes of this world think they are Winston Churchill, standing up to appeasement, refusing to deals with the Hitler of Baghdad, and they play out this preposterous, pathetic, obscene third rate theatre as if they are World War II leaders. And when you listen to this, you think God the bushes and the blares are midgets of this world. Here is the real leader. This is one of the real Titans, Winston Churchill.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It didn't matter that it was a work of fiction. It was quite a funny film as well. But what was the phrase once used by Sunday Times War correspondent Nick Tomlin, who died in the seventy three war? All you need is a foreign correspondent are a few facts a passable knowledge of English and rat like cunning, and the rat like cunning did appeal to me because I'm a rat like person when I'm really after a story.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, she always said it always comes out well in the end. She even believed at the end as she dying she was dying of Parkinson's Oh they've got a cure coming for it apparently maybe I can hang on till then not bad.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because I'd read in a schoolbook somewhere of some boy was calling his father father, and it was a way of mocking him a little bit. You see, he wanted to be called Dad called him father. It's a way of a little way of annoying him. And then I began to call him King Billy, Bill being his first name. And at first he resented this, and gradually he realized there was a kind of affection in it. In fact, in the letter he left for me when he died in nineteen ninety two, age ninety three. He lived a long life, chose my dad well that way. He actually said, you know, thank you for making us so proud, old boy, and look after your mother who's given me the greatest years of happiness in my life, and he signed himself King Billy.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings very, very famous, used by Oliver Stone in that extraordinary film platoon, a piece of music of utter conviction that if you listen to this you understand the meaning of real tragedy, that war is about the total failure of the human spirit. It wasn't written about war, but it's a message for someone like me. I've heard it many I play it in Beirut sometimes. It is absolutely devastating.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my mother used to have a film camera and she has colour films silent, of course. Of my father and I snowballing in the days when we had real snow in Kent in Maidstone, we were four feet high, not the rubbish snow we have now. And clearly I am having great fun slowing snowballs at him, and I obviously worshipped him because all boys worship their father or want to. But I have very clear members of him shouting at me, beating me if I interrupted him when he was talking to my mother. and I started to despise that. You have to earn respect. You can't demand it from a child.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he, you know, in a sense refusing the narrative of history, refusing to obey orders is part of what journalism is about.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The happenings of the First It was, it was to the some in fifty six, nineteen fifty six when I was ten years old. My father wanted to go back and find the little cottage in which he spent the first night of peace on november eleventh, nineteen eighteen. I've actually been back since and found the house again and talked to the people who lived in it. He was too shy to knock on the front door in nineteen fifty six, though he would have found the daughter of the old lady who used to serve him breakfast. But yes, I think one of the things that affected him deeply he talked about it a lot. He was ordered to command a firing party to execute an Australian soldier of the same age as himself nineteen, who had actually killed a British military policeman in Paris, and he refused. My father's a very right wing conservative man. In the end I didn't even go and see him when he was dying in nursing home. But he refused to be an order. Someone else shot the Australian soldier. He didn't save him. But the idea of my father refusing an order, a man who believed in magistrates, judges, capital punishment.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he was nineteen when he was sent to the Third Battle of the Salm in 1918. He was much older than my mother. My mother wasn't even born when he was on the Western Front. But he obviously was haunted by the few months he spent there. I grew up listening to my father talking about the First War, and he was”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benjamin Britton's war requiem. The particular section I want to play is in fact meant to sound like the guns of the Western Front. My father, who was a soldier in the First War, actually played the war requiem to him, and he couldn't stand it. It was too modern for him. But this bit he admired.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got so used to meeting these various rogues and murderers and mafiosians so called democratic Leaders in the Middle East that I don't actually have much personal feeling. But like him, I think there was a sort of sense of humour, not him, but from me and I said here we go again another secret meeting with Bin Laden on another bloody mountain. And I think he realized that I was sometimes a bit tired when I had to drag myself over the deserts of Afghanistan to meet him in some wretched tent. He spotted that.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rather vain man in his robe he was in the Sudanese desert, and he thought he was very frightened of me because I was the first foreign journalist he'd ever met. He was very worried I was going to ask him about terrorism. And instead of that, I asked him about what it was like to fight the Soviet army, because, of course, he used to be on our side fighting the Russians in Afghanistan nineteen eighty, eighty one, eighty two. And it was an immense feeling of relief went over him. He was a very vulnerable man at that stage. And he talked about his sense of calmness under fire and a mortar shell fell at his feet. And many would wish that it had blown up, of course, and he said I felt the sense of what he called Sakina and calmness, inner calmness. And I thought oof ouch, this is how these people are born. He survived, but he didn't care.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it makes me more angry when I see dead people, especially of course because mostly I see dead civilians. It makes me realize what a very, very narrow line there is between living and dying. It's very easy to die, very easy to get killed. I always think if you saw what I saw in wars, which you don't because of course television cuts out the bloodiest scenes, or we mustn't see the pornography of death. We should we should because if you saw what I saw, you know, dogs tearing corpses to pieces, women and children bond in the desert, you would never support at war again, never ever.”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was thinking the other day whether I actually enjoyed the life I've had, and I think I haven't. I might have been passionate about it, but I don't think I've actually enjoyed it. I was sitting on the boulevards in Paris and watching families walking down the street in the sunlight, and I went back to Beirut and sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean and thought to myself, did I really want these last thirty years of war? Couldn't I have lived a happier, safer, more secure life and seen something else? And I wondered whether perhaps I'd just wasted it, you know?”
2006-10-15 · Desert Island Discs · Robert Fisk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source