Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes. "
Tim O'Brien
Enemy
Also
Bullet
Related Quotes:
" From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. "
Tim O'Brien
War
White
Brooklyn
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Innocent
World
Place
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Ugly
Find
Me
" Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain. "
Tim O'Brien
Pain
Does
Like
" I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war. "
Tim O'Brien
War
Cheerful
Kind
" A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars. "
Tim O'Brien
Born
Go
Happen
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Imagination
Keep Going
Power
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
People
Draft
Join
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Forget
Sometimes
You
" When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it. "
Tim O'Brien
Observing
Book
Enjoy
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Events
Story
Unexpected
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
War
Lose
Appreciate
" In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination. "
Tim O'Brien
Much
Talk
Focus
" A true war story is never moral. "
Tim O'Brien
Story
Moral
Never
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Detail
Marriage
Attention
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Daughter
Son
Say
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
People
Find
College
" I showed up in October 1946, part of an early surge that would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister Kathy was born a year later. "
Tim O'Brien
Sister
Baby
Great
" The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on the ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow. "
Tim O'Brien
Knowing
Sorrow
Kid
" A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life. "
Tim O'Brien
Event
Small
Seemingly
" Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words. "
Tim O'Brien
Big
Feel
Inside
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Life
Funny
Sad
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Farmer
You
War
" We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me. "
Tim O'Brien
Adventures
Always
History
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Rhythm
Breath
Pace
" 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir. "
Tim O'Brien
War
My Own
Feel
" I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it. "
Tim O'Brien
Think
Three
Graduation
" Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie. I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering. "
Tim O'Brien
Random
Always
Better
" What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later. "
Tim O'Brien
Think
War
Army
" I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers. "
Tim O'Brien
Place
Ghosts
Memories