Tim O'Brien Quotes

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

I think the films Insomnia and Memento share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

A fact is not a truth until you love it.

There is a world of difference between facts and the truth. You can have so many facts that you don't deal with the truth. You never get to the truth. You have the places where, the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how - blah blah. And never get to the human truth. The human truth is as elusive as the air. And as important as the air.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

History is merely gossip.

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.

An emotion as much tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched.

From what I could see, the hardwood was just fine. Then again, I'd just see a windmill and an open sky, too, never feeling the need to conquer either. You think it's all obvious and straightforward, this world. But really, it's all in who is doing the looking.

What is reality if it isn't how we feel about things?

Facts do not constitute truth.

Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.

Those are facts. Are they the truth? No, for they do not tell you of the heart, and that is where truth lives.