For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

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

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

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.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.