But in a story I can steal her soul.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
Once someone’s dead you can’t make them undead.
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
There is always the threat of tomorrow’s treachery, or next year’s treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?
Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter – like a wail – acknowledges and replies to pain.
I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.
They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
A true war story is never moral...
The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.
If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth.
Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.