Tim O'Brien Quotes

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

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.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

I hated him for making me stop hating him

Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.

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.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.

With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

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.

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.

Stories can save us.

Stories are for joining the past to the future.

On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

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.

I survived, but it's not a happy ending.

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.

Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.

They would repair the leaks in their eyes.

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.

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.

Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.

Zapped while zipping.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear.