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" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Me
Most
Percent
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" A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes. "
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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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" 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. "
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" For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling. "
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" My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. "
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Power
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" 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
" I think I'm a pretty moral guy, a very moral guy, but I'm not perfect. "
Tim O'Brien
Guy
Not Perfect
Think
" 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
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Me
Age
Earth
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
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" You don't have to be in Nam to be in Nam. "
Tim O'Brien
You
" I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage. "
Tim O'Brien
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" 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
" 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
" I've been surprised by Austin. I had a cowboy image of the place. It's a pretty sophisticated city - in some ways, more sophisticated than Boston. And there's a lighter feel to the place. It's very good for my spirits. "
Tim O'Brien
Good
Place
Feel
" Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. "
Tim O'Brien
Storytelling
Human
More
" I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously. "
Tim O'Brien
American
Same
War
" I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers. "
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Place
Ghosts
Memories
" 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
" At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. "
Tim O'Brien
Bottom
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Same
" 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
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Kid
" 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
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" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Young
Years
Place
" The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone. "
Tim O'Brien
Gone
Peace
You
" To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography. "
Tim O'Brien
Only
Detail
Service
" 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. "
Tim O'Brien
Say
Myself
Think
" '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