Tim O'Brien Stories Quotations

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.

Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company.

After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time.

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

A true war story is never moral...

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

But this too is true: stories can save us.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

Let the story tell itself.

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

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.