318 Quotes by Tim O'Brien

It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.

For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so peace is infinitely more than the absence of war.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

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

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.

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

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.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.