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

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

... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.