“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.”

“A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.”

“Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.”

“Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

“In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”