Tobias Wolff Quotes
Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
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.
The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.
Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
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.
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.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
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.
Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
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.
There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.
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.
We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
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.
I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.
There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
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.
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.
I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.
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.
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.
I'm a survivor, " I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.