Interviews | December 01, 1991

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Everything I’ve written has come partly out of my own concerns as a human being, and often directly out of those concerns, but the story lines themselves, the events of the stories, and the characters in the stories, the places in the stories, are almost all invented, even the Vietnam stuff.  If I don’t know it I just make it up, trying not to violate the world as I know it.  Ninety percent or more of the material in the book is invented, and I invented 90 percent of a new Tim O’Brien, maybe even more than that.

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