Best quotes by Phil Klay on War

Checkout quotes by Phil Klay on War

• ‟ If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

  - 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
  

• ‟ War is complicated and intense, and it takes time and thoughts to understand what it was.

  - 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.

  - Phil Klay
  

• ‟ People should be able to tell stories that are important to them to try and understand what they mean. I don't think you figure anything out on your own. Certainly not war stories.

  - Phil Klay
  

• ‟ I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.

  - Phil Klay
  

• ‟ People have a very political way of looking at war, and that's understandable.

  - Phil Klay
  

• ‟ I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war.

  - Phil Klay
  

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

  - 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.

  - Phil Klay
  

• ‟ 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.

  - 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.

  - Phil Klay
  

• ‟ In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

  - 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.

  - Phil Klay