I thought I was going to die in the war. I was on a terrible ship. It was the Casablanca, the first baby flattop. There were always holes in it, and people dying and it was just the worst place for me to be. I really was desperate. I just wanted to jump off . I thought I was going to die anyway, be killed, and I wanted to die because I couldn’t endure what looked like an endless way of life with which I had nothing to do—the war, the ship, and the water. . . . I have been terrified of water all my life. I would have fits when I got close to it. Suddenly—it was out on a deck in the cold—I saw the breath that came from me. And I thought that the simplest thing that I know is what I belong to and where I came from and I just called out to my family as I stood there that night, and it just . . . I saw this breath come from me and I thought—in that breath, in that call, is their existence, is their reality . . . and I must shape that and I must write about them—The House of Breath. (The Paris Review interview 1976)