"But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."
— Tim O'Brien

""That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.""
— Tim O'Brien

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)