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Tim O'Brien Quotes


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Quotes by Tim O'Brien

Showing 41-50 of 81 Quotes by Tim O'Brien

To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.

~Tim O'Brien

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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.

~Tim O'Brien

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When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.

~Tim O'Brien

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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.

~Tim O'Brien

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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.

~Tim O'Brien

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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.

~Tim O'Brien

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In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age 7, Worthington seemed a perfectly splendid spot on the earth.

~Tim O'Brien

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I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war.

~Tim O'Brien

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When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.

~Tim O'Brien

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I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.

~Tim O'Brien

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Author

Born: October 1st, 1946

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