Phil Klay
Phil Klay
Phil Klayis an American writer and United States Marine officer who won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
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A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
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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.
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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.
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Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
genuinely interested perspective
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.
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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.
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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.
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I doubt there's anything you could say to Donald Rumsfeld that would puncture the armor of his narcissism.
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Resilience is, of course, necessary for a warrior. But a lack of empathy isn't.
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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.
Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.
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We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.
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Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
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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.