Tim O'Brien (author) Quotes

It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the e...

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian C...

In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jigg...

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can a...

When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You co...

you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care...

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream alo...

Zapped while zipping.

They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy...

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture...

Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.

It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger ha...

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, ...

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive ...

…he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a v...

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course,...

They would repair the leaks in their eyes.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing ...

Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim a...

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water...

I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who know...

Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they ...

In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatche...

With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.

I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- ...

In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldie...

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seem...

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism...

I survived, but it's not a happy ending.

Stories are for joining the past to the future.

But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're ...

Stories can save us.

You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spri...

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hyp...

At what point,” he asked, “does one decide on rafters and a rope? Answer: no points to be had. There...

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, insertin...

I hated him for making me stop hating him

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of p...

It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be coward...

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it no...

They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zap...

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are ...

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an explo...

I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet ...

Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.

I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, a...

On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it da...

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere - the power of the human imagination t...

The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to...

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen's fu...

Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel les...

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going int...

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do w...

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm...

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a h...

But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was poss...

In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state t...

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral stru...

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the tr...

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.

Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.

I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of - I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of...

A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unrea...

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the tr...

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

I was a coward. I went to the war.