Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
famous hit letters money
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.
form issue poetry
Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.
center horrible humor love pitiful
Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.
bass danny electric fairly fantastic guitar harmony player playing plays september since sings upright
My accompanists are Danny Barnes and Dennis Crouch. Dennis is a fantastic upright bass player -- and Danny sings harmony and plays electric guitar and he plays the banjo. Danny's been playing since September with me and we can do most everything fairly convincingly from the records, especially with that electric guitar arsenal.
deals funny humor life matter movies sad woody
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen's funny movies - all the humor comes out of sad stuff. Sometimes you have to laugh, no matter what life deals you.
hated time war
I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.
behind best bit delete expressed paragraph phrase possible strikes
If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.
curve customers framework inside internal learning view
We want to give customers an inside view of our implementation so they could have a framework so they could go and do the same thing. If we can shorten the learning curve for our customers and for internal developers, that's success.
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We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.
movies none novels tales
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.
courage harder physical
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.
bad close detail marriage paying
When you're so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.
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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.