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" A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book. "
Phil Klay
Pretty
Good
Great
Related Quotes:
" We have a tendency to think of war as this quasi-mystical thing, and that interpretation flattens the experience - by using different perspectives, I wanted to open a place for readers to compare and contrast, to make judgments, to engage. "
Phil Klay
Place
Experience
Think
" 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
" 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. "
Phil Klay
Thinking
People
Myself
" I have two friends named Matt. They're both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn't be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008. "
Phil Klay
Different
You
Two
" People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories. "
Phil Klay
People
Think
Try
" I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans. "
Phil Klay
Anti-War
War
Just
" 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
" Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through. "
Phil Klay
Fiction
Way
Through
" In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal. "
Phil Klay
Military
Look
Always
" I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors. "
Phil Klay
Great
Travel
Soldiers
" I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with. "
Phil Klay
New York
City
People
" 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
" When I was in Marine training I memorised 'The Waste Land,' which was a significant experience in terms of really breaking apart language and thinking about how the different voices in that poem function. "
Phil Klay
Language
Training
Thinking
" I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people. "
Phil Klay
Stress
Who
You
" There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that. "
Phil Klay
Writing
Truth
Tradition
" Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it. "
Phil Klay
Farce
Soldiers
Way
" It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key. "
Phil Klay
Own
Perspective
Talking
" 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
" 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 saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.' "
Phil Klay
Difficult
Back
Think
" 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
" Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't. "
Phil Klay
Resilience
Lack
Empathy
" 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
" 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. "
Phil Klay
People
Live
Breakfast
" Sometimes macho language is to mask things people are not ready to deal with. "
Phil Klay
Ready
People
Mask
" One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism. "
Phil Klay
About
Always
Military
" Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other. "
Phil Klay
You
War
People
" The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed. "
Phil Klay
Relationship
Smart
Time
" War is too strange to process alone. "
Phil Klay
Strange
War
Too
" I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. "
Phil Klay
Jazz
Sound
Opera