Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
deals funny humor life matter movies sad woody
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has. Look at Woody Allen's funny movies - all the humor comes out of sad stuff. Sometimes you have to laugh, no matter what life deals you.
background course detail good imagined insofar physical provide rather rest vital
To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.
join people war
With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.
concise felt nixon tempted
Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie. I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering.
dimensions stuff bad-stuff
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
partly
When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.