I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

A true war story is never moral.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.