Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things...I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones -- that kind of love.

Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

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.

Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.