Phil Klay

“A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.”

“Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.”

“Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?”

“I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.”

“I don't want to act as though my deployment was particularly rough, because it wasn't. I had a very mild deployment; I was a staff officer.”

“One of the things that's difficult for people to understand is when you join the military, you don't sign up as an endorsement of any particular policy of the moment.”

“I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.”

“I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.”

“I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.”

“We're told that when we remember, the same parts of our brain light up as when we experienced the event we're remembering. Your brain lives through it again.”

“I always wrote - not about war, necessarily, but I always wrote stories. I tried to write while I was in Iraq. It's not really - I didn't do a very good job, and not about war.”

“Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with.”

“Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.”

“Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question.”

“If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.”

“Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.”

“With fiction, you can take something that bothers you, or that you don't have in clear focus, and you can put it under as much stress as you want. Really get underneath the skin. With nonfiction, you're restricted to what happened.”

“When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues.”

“Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.”

“It's not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that's the craft that you're doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books.”