Tobias Wolff quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Tobias Wolff on Wise Famous Quotes.

Just don't lose the magic.

Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends.

The human heart is a dark forest

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

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.

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 was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.

Want! You must want something. What do you want?

I'm a survivor, I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.

We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.

I was giving up
being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.

A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

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.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.

... 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.

Lose Faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That's how we find out who we are.

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.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

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.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.

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.

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.

I had no right to see them this way.

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.

We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are.

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.