We all need a place that we can go, And feel over the rainbow
Writing about a war will always be political writing, no matter what amount of hermetical hide-and-seek or aesthetical operations are involved.
A book is not only written - after it's finished it starts writing you, the writer. You become its notebook, its sheet of paper on which it forces you to think and rethink your original ideas, your topics, your research, actually everything.
Never too late to learn a language. And the good literature to come with it.
By changing the way I experienced things, even just involving different details than in reality, I often felt I was betraying the past and playing an unfair game with the reader where he (of course) would ask himself "Did this really happen?"
It can stand in the way of narration in cases where we want the protagonist to actually go through some kind of catharsis while our own (non-fictional) experiences and stories lead to something banal or completely uninteresting.
It is a bit more challenging for the simple fact that now the stories I am writing are relying more on my imagination than on facts, more on research than on memory; so it is basically a slower writing process, more reading, more exploring. On the other hand, this approach is a little bit relieving too, since many times while writing [How the Soldieer Repairs the Gramophone] I felt too close and equal to my character.
I don't know of a soul who packed more living into 72 years than Charles Lindbergh did.
I come from a very big family. . . nine parents.
Everyone wants to change, but no one wants to do anything differently.
Thank God we are not to be judged by the opinions of our fellows, but by the work that we do.