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" Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see. "

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" 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. "

" The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment. "

" Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected. "

" Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex. "

" I've certainly thought a lot more about things like tyranny and patriotism and violence. I think I found some kind of clarity - definitely a thicker understanding. "

" 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. "

" Responsibility and accountability is a big part of being in the military. "

" 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. "

" Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I grew up a little north of New York City and went to high school at Regis, an all-boys tuition-free high school in Manhattan. "

" 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.' "

" I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it. "

" A lot of times, you're interacting with people for whom you're one of the very few veterans that they've met or had a lot of interactions with, and there's a temptation for you to feel like you can pontificate about what the experience was or what it meant, and that leads to a lot of nonsense. "

" War is too strange to process alone. "

" I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis. "

" War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war. "

" Less than 1 percent of American have served in 12 years of war, and serious public conversation about military policy is sorely lacking. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable. "

" 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. "

" 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. "