Top 72 Tobias Wolff Quotes
#1. I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Chad Harbach
#2. I am really into how words sound out loud, so I was always the kid who would, like, read the page of the book to herself in her room over and over and over. And Raymond Carver is great for that. Tobias Wolff is an author who is really good for that as well.
Lorde
#3. The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
Tobias Wolff
#4. Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
Tobias Wolff
#5. Getting from La Jolla to Alta Vista State Hospital isn't easy, unless you have a car or a breakdown. April's Father had a breakdown and they got him there in no time.
Tobias Wolff
#6. To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.
Tobias Wolff
#7. Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.
Tobias Wolff
#8. There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
Tobias Wolff
#9. What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
Tobias Wolff
#10. 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 short stories are not constructed like novels.
Tobias Wolff
#11. 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 had to have.
Tobias Wolff
#12. 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 late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
Tobias Wolff
#14. You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
Tobias Wolff
#15. I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
Tobias Wolff
#16. That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.
Tobias Wolff
#17. In order for us to live comfortably with ourselves while living on unjust terms with others, we have to tell ourselves a story that makes us innocent.
Tobias Wolff
#18. Want! You must want something. What do you want?
Tobias Wolff
#19. One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.
Tobias Wolff
#20. And I learned that it's a bad idea to curse if you're in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.
Tobias Wolff
#21. I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.
Tobias Wolff
#23. The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
Tobias Wolff
#24. Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.
Tobias Wolff
#25. Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.
Tobias Wolff
#26. Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
Tobias Wolff
#27. It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.
Tobias Wolff
#28. E felt no more than a boy again-but a very well-versed boy who couldn't help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.
Tobias Wolff
#29. Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.
Tobias Wolff
#30. There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
Tobias Wolff
#31. Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Tobias Wolff
#32. 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 in the world; that is already reserved for them.
Tobias Wolff
#33. Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I'm being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It's true - rhyme's a completely bankrupt device. It's just wishful thinking. Nostalgia.
Tobias Wolff
#34. Lose Faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That's how we find out who we are.
Tobias Wolff
#35. Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
Tobias Wolff
#36. A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.
Tobias Wolff
#37. The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
Tobias Wolff
#38. One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
Tobias Wolff
#39. 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 time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.
Tobias Wolff
#40. Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends.
Tobias Wolff
#41. The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will
do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and
talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.
Tobias Wolff
#42. And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
Tobias Wolff
#43. When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
Tobias Wolff
#44. A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
Tobias Wolff
#45. 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 that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.
Tobias Wolff
#46. There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
Tobias Wolff
#47. It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people.
Tobias Wolff
#49. 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 it.
Tobias Wolff
#50. 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 encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.
Tobias Wolff
#51. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Tobias Wolff
#52. I'm a survivor, I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.
Tobias Wolff
#53. But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
Tobias Wolff
#54. 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 up around people who told stories all the time.
Tobias Wolff
#55. Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
Tobias Wolff
#56. You could say that all my characters are reflections of myself, in that I share their wish to count for something, and their utmost confusion as to how this is supposed to be done.
Tobias Wolff
#57. Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.
Tobias Wolff
#58. Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
Tobias Wolff
#59. We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are.
Tobias Wolff
#60. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
Tobias Wolff
#61. Writers, to my way of thinking, are no more free in their choices than most people. Our material chooses us; certain things engage us, certain things do not.
Tobias Wolff
#62. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.
Tobias Wolff
#63. I was giving up
being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.
Tobias Wolff
#64. I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best
Tobias Wolff
#65. When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave. Never sacrifice yourselves - never! Whoever urges you to self-sacrifice is worse than a common murderer, who at least cuts your throat himself, without persuading YOU to do it.
Tobias Wolff
#66. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.
Tobias Wolff
#67. ... why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.
Tobias Wolff
#68. Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
Tobias Wolff
#69. We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
Tobias Wolff
#70. I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves.
Tobias Wolff
#71. 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, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.
Tobias Wolff
#72. I tell you, the one thing I hate is an absolutist. I hate absolutist ideologies, I hate absolutist aesthetics, I hate absolutist theologies, they're the burden and bane of this world.
Tobias Wolff
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