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

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

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

- Tim O'Brien

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the 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

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