What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

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

Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.

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

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