He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman’s strength in Mellas at all.

For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.

Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.

Everything is touched by the holy when it is in the presence of death.

I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript.

When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting.

When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body

It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about

Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.