Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see.

- Phil Klay

You're not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens - you're supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well.

- 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.

- Phil Klay

I ended up going to Dartmouth, and I did Marine Officer Candidate School during my junior summer.

- 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.

- Phil Klay

I did try to write in Iraq, and I failed. I think you just don't have the brain space for it.

- 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.

- Phil Klay

For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.

- Phil Klay

Fiction is the best way I know how to think something through.

- 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?

- 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.

- Phil Klay

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

- Phil Klay

A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.

- Phil Klay

There's a tradition of public service in my family. I'm one of three boys that joined the military. My father was in the Peace Corps.

- 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.

- Phil Klay

Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.

- Phil Klay

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key.

- Phil Klay

Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.

- Phil Klay

I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.

- Phil Klay

I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.

- Phil Klay