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

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

Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.

A true war story is never moral.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.