Quote

You might want to write 'War and Peace,' but that might not be who you are. You might be better off with nursery rhymes.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war.

Jokes are better than war. Even the most aggressive jokes are better than the least aggressive wars. Even the longest jokes are better than the shortest wars.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

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.

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.

War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.