ByQuotes

Tim O'Brien Quotes

Powerful Tim O'Brien for Daily Growth

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

Year, Boom, Surge, Year Later

In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth.

- Tim O'Brien

Insurance, Small, Became, Austin

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

Representation, Accurate, Inward

A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.

- Tim O'Brien

Enemy, Depending, Whom, Strikes

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.

- Tim O'Brien

Stories, Telling, Separate, Pin

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

City, Country, Streets, Defining

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

- Tim O'Brien

Death, Bottom, Fathers, Grieving

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

Innocent, Pretty, Before, Galloping

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

Soldiers, Stories, Putting, Nonfiction

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.

- Tim O'Brien

Small, Seemingly, Determine, Inconsequential

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

Pink, Bright, Extremely, Desolate

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

Might, May, Helping, Traps

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

- Tim O'Brien

Kind, Stories, Gene, Cheerful

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

Some, Always, Interviewing, Concise

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

Guilt, Like, Tracing, Sergeant

To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.

- Tim O'Brien

Impact, Within, Function, Actively

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

- Tim O'Brien

Writing, Important, Very, Articulate

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

Rest, Reason, Internal, Filter

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

- Tim O'Brien

Through, Fiction, Subject, Fiction Writer

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.

- Tim O'Brien

Moral Courage, Than, Learned, Physical Courage

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

Young, Back, Years, Province

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

New, Beneath, Allow, Small-Town

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

Frustration, Could, Squeeze, Combining

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

Famous, Soldiers, Makes, Letters

Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.

- Tim O'Brien

Reason, Why, Otherwise, Novels

In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense.

- Tim O'Brien

War, Aim, Sense, Literal

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

Bed, Throat, Bombs, Whereas

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

Need, Like, Move, Boat

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

Art, Exploration, Fiction, Uncertain

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

Some, Rightly, Remained, Decades

If you're searching for quotes on a different topic, feel free to browse our Topics page or explore a diverse collection of quotes from various Authors to find inspiration.