American - Author | October 1, 1946 -
Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.
Tim O'Brien
WordsFeelInsideBigLikeI Feel
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
LifePowerPeopleBelieveMy Life
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.
PinkKindBrightLandMilitaryUp
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.
WalkingPlaceAfraidVietnamEven
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.
FailureFocusImaginationTalkThan
Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.
StoryHelpUnexpectedHumanEvents
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.
HeartLieWarNightStoryGoal
When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.
BookEnjoyJustObservingPartly
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.
MarriageDetailAttentionYouBad
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.
FatherWarNew YorkYearBrooklyn
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.
GreatBabySisterYearEarlyBorn
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.
ManNew YorkPeopleSecretsNumbers
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Tim O'Brien quotes