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" I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy. "
Tim O'Brien
World
Long
Live
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" Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved. "
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" 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
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War
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Exploration
Find
You
" 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
" Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth. "
Tim O'Brien
Truth
Fiction
Lie
" 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
" 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
" It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing. "
Tim O'Brien
Hard
Important
Things
" I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage. "
Tim O'Brien
Physical
Courage
Moral
" 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
" You don't have to be in Nam to be in Nam. "
Tim O'Brien
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. "
Tim O'Brien
Story
War
Goal
" 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
" War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is. "
Tim O'Brien
Existence
Good
Know
" 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
" Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor. "
Tim O'Brien
Love
Kind
Horrible
" I returned to Vietnam in '94, and even then, all those decades later, walking around that place, I remained afraid. And, in some ways, rightly so. "
Tim O'Brien
Walking
Afraid
Place
" 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
" 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
" 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 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Mistakes
Revenge
Courage
" '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
" Pinkville was called Pinkville because in the military maps, it was shaded a bright kind of shimmering pink, which signified what was called on the maps a 'built up' area, which was extremely misleading - 'built up' only meant there were little villages and it wasn't just desolate paddy land or unpopulated. "
Tim O'Brien
Maps
Pink
Land
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Numbers
People
Chicago
" 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
" 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
" In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers signed up intentionally. That's a huge difference from the largely conscripted army of my era. "
Tim O'Brien
Difference
Era
Army
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Ocean
Need
Move On
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
You
Eyes
Aim
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Circumstances
Step
Love