Tim O'Brien Quotes

I've been asked what differentiates war literature as a category, and I don't think there is anything.

Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.

I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.

There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.

Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can.

Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years.

I read a lot of war literature.

I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.

I don't go to war for the adrenaline rush. I cover wars because that's what I've ended up doing.

My personal opinion is that if someone writes honestly about war, it will inherently be anti-war.

No one hates war like a soldier hates war.

There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.

After four or five different wars, I grew weary of that work, partly because in an open war, open to coverage, as Vietnam was, it's not that difficult, really.

I never desired to go into war zones. I never had any thought about it. It sort of just happened as part of the job.

My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'

My father and all my uncles on both sides served in the military in World War II and Korea.

I am not sure that you, the younger generations, will like to go to war that we went through. So, we learn as the mistakes are being committed.

I've gone to war zones before and never got shot.