QUOTES by Phil Klay
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I think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen.
Quote by -Phil Klay
At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.
Quote by -Phil Klay
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are as much every U.S. citizen's wars as they are the veterans' wars. If we don't assume that civilians have just as much ownership and the moral responsibilities that we have as a nation when we embark on something like that, then we're in a very bad situation.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I like the ethos of the military and the idea of joining an institution in which, at the very least, everyone who signs up believes in something.
Quote by -Phil Klay
If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I love opera. I love jazz, especially Mingus. This makes me sound highbrow. I'm not.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I went straight from the Marine Corps to the MFA. The way that you would express things among Marines is somewhat different than the way you're supposed to express things in a creative-writing workshop.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Certainly, when I'd left Iraq back in 2008, I'd been proud of my service, but whether we'd been successful or not was still an open question.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.
Quote by -Phil Klay
There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else.
Quote by -Phil Klay
In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, 'This is the Iraq experience.'
Quote by -Phil Klay
War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?
Quote by -Phil Klay
I literally went straight to New York City from Iraq, which was bizarre and complicated. I was walking down Madison Avenue, and it was spring, and people were smartly dressed, and it was so strange because there was no sense that we were at war. It was something to grapple with.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.
Quote by -Phil Klay
It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.
Quote by -Phil Klay
There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.
Quote by -Phil Klay
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.
Quote by -Phil Klay
There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.
Quote by -Phil Klay
I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors.
Quote by -Phil Klay
'Redeployment' is a military term. It means to transfer a unit from one area to another.
Quote by -Phil Klay
The civilian wants to respect what the veteran has gone through. The veteran wants to protect memories that are painful and sacred to him from outside judgment.
Quote by -Phil Klay