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" Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you. "

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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. "

Tim O'Brien

Frustration

Fear

" 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

" 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. "

" When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story. "

" Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling. "

Tim O'Brien

Way

Vietnam

" I think I'm a pretty moral guy, a very moral guy, but I'm not perfect. "

" Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you stop loving someone, did you ever love them? If you say you're committed and later you're not committed, well, was the first thing commitment? You see what I mean? This kind of thing has always interested me. "

" 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. "

" 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

Age

Earth

" 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. "

" Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company. "

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

Tim O'Brien

You

" Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. "

Tim O'Brien

Storytelling

Human

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

" 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. "

" The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human. "

" A true war story is never moral. "

" 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

Most

Percent

" 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. "