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" 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. "

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" There's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan. "

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

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

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

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

" You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war. "

" I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front. "

" Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't. "

" 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. "

" In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal. "

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

" The notion that war forever separates veterans from the rest of mankind has been long embedded in our collective consciousness. "

" I have, for a very long time, been a huge admirer of Marilynne Robinson, whose work I just love. "

" When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me. "

" 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. "

" Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance. "

" 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. "

" 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 was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me. "

" War is too strange to process alone. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" You're not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens - you're supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well. "

" Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative. "

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

" I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not. "