“I think I'm a pretty moral guy, a very moral guy, but I'm not perfect.” — Tim O'Brien Quote

I think I'm a pretty moral guy, a very moral guy, but I'm not perfect.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.

Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.

I feel a big obligation to the audience, almost in a moral sense, to say something useful. If I'm going to spend a year of my life on these things, I want something that I feel that strongly about.

Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.

I'm not any more moral than my neighbors.

It's not only a moral obligation, but a social responsibility to leave the game and our vocation better than we found it.