Tim O'Brien Fiction Quotations

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.