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

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" 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. "

" I never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps. "

" I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism. "

" It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured. "

" 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A lot of the great pieces of journalism from Iraq showed how important command influence was in violent, aggressive environments, where Marines and soldiers had a constrained set of choices to make in sudden moments. "

" 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. "

" There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else. "

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

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

" One thing I've always liked about the military is there's a certain amount of pragmatism. "

" 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. "

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

" For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen. "

" 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. "

" War is too strange to process alone. "

" 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. "