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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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" 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

" With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military. "

" Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved. "

" 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. "

" When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "