If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote.
The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.
You learn, finally, that you’ll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can’t ever bring any of it back again. You just can’t.
They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it.
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.
A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it – like running a dead-end maze – no way out – it couldn’t come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.
Did I choose this life of illusion? Don’t be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.
Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.
It’s very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it’s not science, it’s an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
I was a coward. I went to the war.
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body – her life.
But this too is true: stories can save us.