Tim O'Brien

Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.

The people in 'July, July' do find themselves looking backward, talking to others and to themselves about those over-the-cliff, fork-in-the-road moments in their lives. I imagine this is what must happen at a 30th college reunion.

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on the ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.