Tim O'Brien Quotes

I am 30, but there are things about me that are still 15.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

I turned myself to face me, but I've never caught a glimpse of how the others must see the faker.

You look in the mirror, but you don't see what you actually look like.

I often feel like I have this spirit living inside of me, always dressing in like short mini skirts... but then I start to discover myself. So there are eight spirits, mischievous ones, sad ones, handsome ones, wise ones, and crazy ones.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?

Being down makes you think who you are.

Before I turned 30, I worked to create Ksenia Sobchak. Ksenia Sobchak turned out to be appalling and terrible in some respects, but nice in others.

I don't feel like a 27-year-old; I feel I am way mature than someone that age.

Fear comes from personal self-acceptance and not the self.

I've often been told that I'm a 30-year-old trapped in a teenager's body. I don't know how I feel about that, but I'll take it, I guess. I'm definitely mature, and I'm the one that takes care of everyone in my friendship group.

I don't know how happy I was when I met Sting. I always had this difficulty of not really knowing who I was.

If I feel like I'm myself, then I'm very uncomfortable.

I know I'm only 24, but I know in my head already I am mature, because I've got the right mental side of it.

I remember in junior high school, which is what we called it, suddenly I was looking at myself, almost through other people's eyes, and thought: how does the world see me? So that was one of the things I was really interested in, when I was writing Goodbye Stranger.

Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

Can't get away from your own self.

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't--and perhaps loses track of just where she is.

"My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside."

Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

I guess with the way that I've conducted myself I'm in the logical spot and I'm fine with that. Even my limited interactions with success have left me confused and bummed out, so I don't think the two can co-exist.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

I suppose that when you're growing up, you're bound to reach an age when you feel buffeted by all the changes in your life, when either your mind begins outpacing your body or your body begins outpacing your mind and you're not quite in conversation with yourself anymore.