A Quote by Tim O'Brien

Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.

Tim O'Brien

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Above Around Behaviors Commonplace Events Extraordinary Help Human Human Behavior Illuminate Imagined Ordinary Organized Startling Story Unexpected Well Which

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Tim O'Brien
American - Novelist
Born: October 1, 1946

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace

Marquis de Sade

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

Raymond Carver

No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary, from commonplace to unique, from low to high'.

Rosalind E. Krauss

Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected.

Chuck Jones

Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. It would apprehend in all particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature.

George Parsons Lathrop

I like the tradition of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances and how they react to events which force them to be heroic in a way that is not in their natures.

Rob Lowe

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

Saul Bellow

Drop the idea of being Extraordinary! It's keeping you mediocre. To be Ordinary is the most extraordinary thing in the world. The Ordinary person has light in his eyes; he has become extraordinary but he has no idea of it.

Rajneesh

We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that's the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary. Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it's called documentary, which I suppose is all right ... We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.

Ben Shahn

I'm drawn to ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, which is a big part of the human condition.

Sissy Spacek

I seem to have been everywhere in the last 30 years, maybe not in the epicenter but flying around the periphery of extraordinary events and equally extraordinary people.

Rupert Everett

I have found in experiments, people become used to the robots. The less startling they become, the more commonplace they get. If these robots do become commonplace, then that uncanny effect will go away.

David Hanson

I did stories about unexpected encounters, back roads, small towns and ordinary folk, sometimes doing something a little extraordinary.

Charles Kuralt

The only difference between an extraordinary life and an ordinary one is the extraordinary pleasures you find in ordinary things.

Veronique Vienne

The extraordinarily facile and in literary terms long lived works tend to be about ordinary people. Even Sappho writes about the utterly insignificant . What art can do is make the extraordinary more ordinary and ordinary more extraordinary.

Robert Dessaix

I think that even though The German Doctor (Wakolda) is placed in a historical context , it is a very intimate story. The film has been extremely well received around the world. It keeps on going around, opening in different markets, and connecting with the audience. In Argentina it was seen by over 450, 000 spectators, which is way more than anything we could have imagined.

Lucia Puenzo

A Quote by Tim O'Brien

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