Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Phil Klay Quotes

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

– Phil Klay

One thing I’ve always liked about the military is there’s a certain amount of pragmatism.

– Phil Klay

I have two friends named Matt. They’re both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn’t be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008.

– 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’m generally not a fan of didactic art because it papers over many of the hard experiences about war or anything else in life. I wanted to explore various aspects of the experience without an eye towards delivering any particular message.

– Phil Klay

At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.

– 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

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

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

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

One of the things that’s difficult for people to understand is when you join the military, you don’t sign up as an endorsement of any particular policy of the moment.

– Phil Klay

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

– Phil Klay

People lie to themselves all the time about what they’ve been through and what it means – I’m no exception. But you write those lies down – lies that really matter to you and that are really painful to let go of because they’ve become a part of who you are – and they don’t work.

– Phil Klay

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

– Phil Klay

Writing ‘Redeployment’ shook me in ways I never expected.

– Phil Klay

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

– 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

Treating war as farce is one way soldiers deal with it.

– Phil Klay

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

– Phil Klay

I saw so many radically different versions of Iraq. It would have been difficult for me to come back and think, ‘This is the Iraq experience.’

– Phil Klay

I suppose it is the lot of soldiers and Marines to be objectified according to the politics of the day and the mood of the American people about their war.

– Phil Klay

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.

– 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

It’s not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that’s the craft that you’re doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books.

– Phil Klay

War is too strange to process alone.

– 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

We’re so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.

– 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 never thought anyone would pity me because of my time in the Marine Corps.

– Phil Klay

Marines and soldiers don’t issue themselves orders; they don’t send themselves overseas. United States citizens elect the leaders who send us overseas.

– Phil Klay

- 1
- 2
- 3