But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world..

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start some….

When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world..

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to..

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth..

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were….

But this too is true: stories can save us..

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imaginati….

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when….

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written..

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth..

It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes thi….

It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes thi….

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been s….

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead..

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has..

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is..

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do..

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunder….

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth..

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and ….