« All Stories Quotes · Tim O'Brien's Page
Stories Quotes by 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.
- But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
- you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you…
- The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in…
- In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war…
- Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got…
- A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders,…
- And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads…
- I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
- In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes…
- [Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
- I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a…
- Let the story tell itself.
- For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd…
- You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?'…
- I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take…
- But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the…
- By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes…
- But in a story I can steal her soul.
- But this too is true: stories can save us.
More Stories Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- I believe in anything that will engage the audience and make the story more effective. — J. J. Abrams
- Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see… — Paul Auster
- Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them… — Paul Auster
- I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do… — Paul Auster
- Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been… — J. J. Abrams
- But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives… — Karen Armstrong
- Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories. — Karen Armstrong
- For whatever reason, maybe it's because of my story, but people associate Livestrong with exercise and physical fitness, health and lifestyle choices… — Lance Armstrong
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison,… — Julian Assange
- In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I… — Chinua Achebe