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
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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
Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows. – Tim O’Brien
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
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life – into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary. – Tim O’Brien
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
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. – Tim O’Brien
I hated the draft, but at the same time, it’s something that made every American take war seriously. – Tim O’Brien
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. – Tim O’Brien
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
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
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. – Tim O’Brien