Words matter. These are the best Tim O’Brien Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.
A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You’re absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can’t do for you.
The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.
It’s very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
Most of the things in ‘The Things They Carried’ didn’t happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it’s invented. It’s not what occurred.
Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we’re reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company.
There’s something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don’t have – and all you may lose forever.
War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It’s good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man’s failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret.
In books or films, it is desirable to have a climactic battle scene, but the world does not operate in those gross dramatic terms. In Vietnam, there was a general aimlessness, not just in the physical sense, but beyond that in the moral and ethical sense.
America before the 1960s was a pretty innocent place. We were the Lone Ranger galloping off to the rescue of the needy and the oppressed of the world, and we could get things done.
It’s one thing to say you’re for the war; it’s another thing to send your kid to war – your daughter or your son.
Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.
Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It’s present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I’m back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.
When you’re so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.
In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth.
Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere – the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow.
I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.
If you stop loving someone, did you ever love them? If you say you’re committed and later you’re not committed, well, was the first thing commitment? You see what I mean? This kind of thing has always interested me.
To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.
In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent.
When writing, I’m not thinking about war, even if I’m writing about it. I’m thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I’m working, even if it’s on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It’s on the story.
The world comes at me that way – comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you’d forget swatting a mosquito.
In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense.
A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.
When I have a book I enjoy, I’m partly in the book. I’m not just observing it.
Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.
No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they’re not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn’t move on the ocean.
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen’s funny movies – all the humor comes out of sad stuff. Sometimes you have to laugh, no matter what life deals you.
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.
You don’t have to be in Nam to be in Nam.
Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.
Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter – like a wail – acknowledges and replies to pain.
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.
Is the Mona Lisa an ‘accurate’ representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It’s a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape – finally makes us look inward at ourselves.
The people in ‘July, July’ do find themselves looking backward, talking to others and to themselves about those over-the-cliff, fork-in-the-road moments in their lives. I imagine this is what must happen at a 30th college reunion.
At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.
After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I’ve stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell – in fact, more all the time.
If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I’ll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I’ll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.
I don’t think I’d call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I’m a writer who has written about war.
For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can’t help but love.
Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.
Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.
