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" A true war story is never moral. "
Tim O'Brien
Story
Moral
Never
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" 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. "
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" I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously. "
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" Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth. "
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" 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. "
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" War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing. "
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" 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. "
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" At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" You don't have to be in Nam to be in Nam. "
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You
" 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. "
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" Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers. "
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" I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of - I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of frustration and anger and fear combining on me... I felt the danger; I felt the squeeze of it. "
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" 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. "
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" Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words. "
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" To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality. "
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" 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. "
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" Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers. "
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" 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. "
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