Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
easier failure fiction issues largely matters tend
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
born fiction happened obligation writers
A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.
fiction truth
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
fiction-stories fiction sufficient
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
art fiction answers
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.
lying fiction sometimes
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
lying fiction helping
Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
join people war
With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.
concise felt nixon tempted
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.
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.
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.
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.