Phil Klay Quotes

After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it.

I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war.

There is always drama and there will always be drama, but its the way its presented in my head that makes it so interesting. Everyone gets their time in the middle of the drama.

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.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it.

It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

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.

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.

As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

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

I don't think so, but it's always in the back of my mind that many of the soldiers being wounded and killed in Iraq are about the same age as my kids. My godson is going over soon, so the war's about to get personal for me.

I didn't go into 'Rabbit Hole' wanting to write about class. I think because of who I am it somehow found its way into it.

It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures... I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with 'Once upon a time.'

I am not sure that you, the younger generations, will like to go to war that we went through. So, we learn as the mistakes are being committed.