Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
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.
grew horrendous kelly stories war
I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.
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.
center horrible humor love pitiful
Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
partly
When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.
background course detail good imagined insofar physical provide rather rest vital
To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.
daughter exclude luck wish
It does not exclude him from the process, and we wish his daughter luck.
I think I'm a pretty moral guy, a very moral guy, but I'm not perfect.
cherish close ghost hometown life midwest present values window
Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.
extremely land maps meant misleading villages
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.
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.
birth catholic lived mostly until war year
From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.