Social Media has now become a part of our culture - you are either a part of it, or you ignore it.
It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
It's the same old story you've heard a thousand times. Somebody's trust gets broken. Somebody's left behind.
I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.
Living to glorify God means doing everything. . . for Him, His way, to point to His greatness and to reflect His goodness.
If someone else made 'Up in the Air' or 'Thank You For Smoking' or 'Juno,' I would have wanted to rip their head off. I need that same sort of passion for every project I take on.