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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. "

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" 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

" I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war. "

" 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. "

" I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers. "

" By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. "

" Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. "

" A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life. "

" 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. "

" You don't have to be in Nam to be in Nam. "

Tim O'Brien

You

" 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. "

" I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is. "

" 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. "

" I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile. "

" We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me. "

" A true war story is never moral. "

" 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

Happen

" After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "