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Tim O'Brien

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By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. - Tim O'Brien
#Down
#Experience
#Own
#Your
#Yourself
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage. - Tim O'Brien
#Courage
#Moral Courage
#Moral
#Physical
The people in 'July, July' do find themselves looking backward, talking to others and to themselves about those over-the-cliff, fork-in-the-road moments in their lives. I imagine this is what must happen at a 30th college reunion. - Tim O'Brien
#Find
#Looking
#Others
#People
#Talking
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. - Tim O'Brien
#Art
#Great
#Look
#Painting
#Wonder
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. - Tim O'Brien
#Famous
#Make
#Man
#Money
#Writing
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. - Tim O'Brien
#Being Human
#Experience
#Heart
#Person
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
#Best
#Find
#Me
#Ugly
#Way
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
#End
#Go
#Gone
#Peace
#Will
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
#Guilt
#Human Life
#Human
#Life
#Sorrow
I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously. - Tim O'Brien
#American
#Every
#Seriously
#Time
#War
A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes. - Tim O'Brien
#Also
#Enemy
#Produce
#Strikes
#Whom
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
#Afghanistan
#Army
#Difference
#Huge
#Up
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth. - Tim O'Brien
#Fiction
#Lie
#Service
#Truth
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. - Tim O'Brien
#Believe
#Dead
#Life
#My Life
#Power
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
#Army
#Being
#Draft
#War
#Wrong
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
#Courage
#Disappointment
#Life
#Revenge
I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers. - Tim O'Brien
#Carry
#Ghosts
#Memories
#People
#Place
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. - Tim O'Brien
#Activity
#Human
#Situation
#Storytelling
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. - Tim O'Brien
#Eyes
#Hometown
#Life
#Look
#Window
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. - Tim O'Brien
#Fiction
#Live
#Our
#Science
#World
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
#Tomorrow
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
#Graduation
#Right
#September
#Three
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
#Anger
#Fear
#Frustration
#Me
#Pressure
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