Tim O'Brien Quotes

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

I had originally been looking at writing, including fiction.

Fiction is organized gossip.

I think I do more fiction than autobiography.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

I'm just a story teller.

My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I'm a fan of great storytelling.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

I love to tell stories and this is my way of getting them down on paper.