A story: A man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war. And afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory, and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands, love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper; his hands remember the rifle.

If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.

My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.

Every war is different. Every war is the same.

It dosnt matter how many mr. and mrs. johnsons are anti war- the actuall killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

It occured to me that we will never be young again.

Right now in American writing there is no genre as exciting as memoir - the writer can do anything, as long as it works. It's like the 1920s up in this joint. So, I'd say, experiment with how you tell the story. In the best memoir it's not the what, it's how the writer tells the what - meaning and effect through form.