Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Imagination is a killer.
Let the story tell itself.
A true war story is never moral.
I was a coward. I went to the war.
But in a story I can steal her soul.
A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
But this too is true: stories can save us.
Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
What happened, and what might have happened?
Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.
A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.
The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.
I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.
All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.
I think I'm a pretty moral guy, a very moral guy, but I'm not perfect.
The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.
It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.
For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling.
A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.
Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.