Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.