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" Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. "
Phil Klay
School
High School
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" I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things. "
Phil Klay
War
Complicated
Want
" 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. "
Phil Klay
Try
Way
War
" I suppose it is the lot of soldiers and Marines to be objectified according to the politics of the day and the mood of the American people about their war. "
Phil Klay
War
Day
American
" The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much every U.S. citizen's wars as they are the veterans' wars. If we don't assume that civilians have just as much ownership and the moral responsibilities that we have as a nation when we embark on something like that, then we're in a very bad situation. "
Phil Klay
Veterans
Situation
Nation
" In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world. "
Phil Klay
War
Death
America
" It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier. "
Phil Klay
Want
You
War
" It's a professional military. You sign up and agree to allow your countrymen to use your life as they see fit for the next four years. And I think we all should have a greater role in ensuring that we use those lives wisely. "
Phil Klay
You
Up
See
" I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything. "
Phil Klay
Been
Literature
Anything
" You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war. "
Phil Klay
Come
Authority
Back
" I'm generally not a fan of didactic art because it papers over many of the hard experiences about war or anything else in life. I wanted to explore various aspects of the experience without an eye towards delivering any particular message. "
Phil Klay
War
Experience
Art
" Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. "
Phil Klay
Pitfalls
Full
Strong
" When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me. "
Phil Klay
People
Strange
React
" 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? "
Phil Klay
Defending
America
Mean
" After the fighting is done, and even when it's still happening, apologies are often needed for the recounting of bare facts. Sometimes bare facts feel unpatriotic. "
Phil Klay
Fighting
Done
Feel
" One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism. "
Phil Klay
About
Always
Military
" I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop. "
Phil Klay
Way
You
Marine Corps
" I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war. "
Phil Klay
War
College
Decision
" 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. "
Phil Klay
You
Clear
Want
" I think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical. "
Phil Klay
Work
Think
People
" People lie to themselves all the time about what they've been through and what it means - I'm no exception. But you write those lies down - lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they've become a part of who you are - and they don't work. "
Phil Klay
Work
You
Down
" The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went. "
Phil Klay
Argument
Military
War
" At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction. "
Phil Klay
Believe
Blind
Book
" If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family. "
Phil Klay
Friends And Family
Friends
Family
" There's a tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps. "
Phil Klay
Three
Service
Family
" There's something odd about working 24/7, being consumed with everything that's happening in Iraq, and then coming back to the country that ordered you over there only to realize that a lot of Americans are not really paying attention. "
Phil Klay
Realize
Attention
Back
" I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something. "
Phil Klay
Signs
Everyone
Like
" In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it. "
Phil Klay
Able
Write
You
" The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness. "
Phil Klay
Consciousness
Long
Rest
" Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through. "
Phil Klay
Fiction
Way
Through
" 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. "
Phil Klay
Successful
Service
Back