American - Writer | 1983 -
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
LifeThinkYouProfessionalSeeUp
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.
WarPuzzleConfusedWayTryThrough
Marines and soldiers don't issue themselves orders; they don't send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas.
MarinesSoldiersUnitedUsLeaders
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.
ExperiencePeopleFeelYouVeterans
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.
WantActBecauseRoughThoughVery
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.
ExperienceWarThinkPlaceContrast
I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.
StressPeopleFriendsYouKnowWho
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.
LifeArtExperienceWarEyeExplore
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.
LiveSmartPeopleBreakfastWriting
I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.
WarThinkLiteratureAnythingBeen
If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.
ExperienceWarHellYouDarkWrite
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.
GoodJobWarWriteGood JobAlways
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Phil Klay quotes