Tim O'Brien Quotes: 9

• That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

• Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.

• 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.

• A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

  The Things They Carried

• 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 this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

  The Things They Carried

• A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

• Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.

  The Things They Carried

• 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, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

• Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

  Tomcat In Love