We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.

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.

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

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

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

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.