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.

Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.

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

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. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.

Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

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

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