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. – Tim O’Brien
The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story. – Tim O’Brien
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
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
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. – Tim O’Brien
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
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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
We tend to regard history as true and ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ as untrue. That’s always puzzled me. – Tim O’Brien
A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. – Tim O’Brien
