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

- Tim O'Brien

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and …

- Tim O'Brien

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

- Tim O'Brien

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were…

- Tim O'Brien

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

- Tim O'Brien

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

- Tim O'Brien

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been s…

- Tim O'Brien

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

- Tim O'Brien

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

- Tim O'Brien