That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
Words, too, have genuine substance — mass and weight and specific gravity.
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. 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. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.
On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happiness because there was no other word.
He’d been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn’t there, but it could be recoiled.
If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth.
But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you’re in a forest and everything’s really quiet, except there’s still this sound you can’t hear.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.
Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit – we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.
You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.
Nostalgia– that’s the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.
Don’t throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen’s funny movies – all the humor comes out of sad stuff. Sometimes you have to laugh, no matter what life deals you.
Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.
I didn’t get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.
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.
I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.
Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere – the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow.
The wars don’t end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I’m gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.
I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of – I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of frustration and anger and fear combining on me… I felt the danger; I felt the squeeze of it.