Tobias Wolff Quotes
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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.
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There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
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One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
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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.
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When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever
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Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
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We are made to persist. that's how we find out who we are.
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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.
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Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
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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.
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The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.
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In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.
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I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now.
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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.
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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.
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We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
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Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.
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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 with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.
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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.
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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.
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Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.
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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.
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Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
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A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.
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Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
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Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
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