Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.” — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn’t happen in some other dimension, a place… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Yes, the issue was courage. It always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn't help it. Noise scared him, dark… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
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… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“The story' Sanders would say "the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it." Tone?' The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.” — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it.” — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“He thought about the difference between good times and bad times, and how funny it was that he could not state the difference, only… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
