American - Writer | 1983 -
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
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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.
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Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
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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.
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I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.
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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.
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I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.
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There's something odd about working 24/7, being consumed with everything that's happening in Iraq, and then coming back to the country that ordered you over there only to realize that a lot of Americans are not really paying attention.
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I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it.
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War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
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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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Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.
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