Tim O'Brien

Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.

I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

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

Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

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.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.

Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.

The people in 'July, July' do find themselves looking backward, talking to others and to themselves about those over-the-cliff, fork-in-the-road moments in their lives. I imagine this is what must happen at a 30th college reunion.

If you stop loving someone, did you ever love them? If you say you're committed and later you're not committed, well, was the first thing commitment? You see what I mean? This kind of thing has always interested me.

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.

Pinkville was called Pinkville because in the military maps, it was shaded a bright kind of shimmering pink, which signified what was called on the maps a 'built up' area, which was extremely misleading - 'built up' only meant there were little villages and it wasn't just desolate paddy land or unpopulated.

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.

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.