All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was...
Beyond
When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.
The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.
Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.
I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it...
I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.
He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for unders...
What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. […]And afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue,...
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. In
Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.
How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of - I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of frustration and anger and fear combining on me... I felt the danger; I felt the squeeze of it.
In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance co...
[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.