Tim O'Brien

Let the story tell itself.

— Tim O'Brien

Imagination is a killer.

— Tim O'Brien

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

— Tim O'Brien

A true war story is never moral.

— Tim O'Brien

But in a story I can steal her soul.

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

— Tim O'Brien

I was a coward. I went to the war.

— Tim O'Brien

“The greater a man's fear, the greater his potential courage”

— Tim O'Brien

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

— Tim O'Brien

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

— Tim O'Brien

“Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original.”

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

“Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.”

— Tim O'Brien

“It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders.”

— Tim O'Brien

Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

— Tim O'Brien

...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and…

— Tim O'Brien

“A hundred stories [...] Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside you.”

— Tim O'Brien

“You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

— Tim O'Brien

“They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.”

— Tim O'Brien

“If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you…

— Tim O'Brien

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...

— Tim O'Brien

“It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the…

— Tim O'Brien

“Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.”

— Tim O'Brien

“Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big…

— Tim O'Brien

“Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very…

— Tim O'Brien

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and…

— Tim O'Brien

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach…

— Tim O'Brien

“He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of…

— Tim O'Brien

“But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world,…

— Tim O'Brien

“In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his…

— Tim O'Brien

“Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to…

— Tim O'Brien

“He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and…

— Tim O'Brien

“I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in…

— Tim O'Brien

“I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were…

— Tim O'Brien

“Still there was so much to say. How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones. Sometimes the bravest…

— Tim O'Brien

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor…

— Tim O'Brien

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war…

— Tim O'Brien

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems…

— Tim O'Brien

It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way…

— Tim O'Brien