Tobias Wolff Quotes

52 quotes in 874 categories

• I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their…
• Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
• Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean…
• Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. Principle had power only until you found what…
• You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place…
• The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that…
• Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
• There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
• I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well,…
• One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in…
• Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession…
• You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best…
• There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
• Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the…
• One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
• I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
• Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
• It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew…
• Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
• But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father…

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