Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.

Part of the reason I'm writing it is to try to figure out what that is myself. It's not like I came back from Iraq and said, "We need to have a conversation, I know exactly what it is." It was just this sort of sense of something missing and then trying to write toward what that was, and to solicit from other people a sense of what that might be.

Veteran art creates a meeting place between veterans and civilians, or simply between veterans with different experiences.

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.

Writing fiction means putting a lot of what you believe about the world at risk, because you have to follow your characters.

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.