Tobias Wolff Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

The writer does not and should not have the last word. That belongs to the reader.

Tobias Wolff
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.

Tobias Wolff
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.

Tobias Wolff
We live by stories. It's the principle by which we organize our experience.

Tobias Wolff
I work best away from the house because I'm too tempted to check for calls and my mail and deal with tradesmen and run an errand, go out for lunch.

Tobias Wolff
Writers often give advice they don't follow to the letter themselves.

Tobias Wolff
That's what writing is and in that way it's very hard work and it absolutely requires all the conditions that make one a bore: You have to be alone a lot, you have to be rather sedentary, you have to be a creature of routine, you have to fetishize your solitude, and you have to become very, very selfish about your time.

Tobias Wolff
Routine becomes invaluable to writers, and that's why once they hit their stride, their biographies make very poor material.

Tobias Wolff
I have also learned that you can be patient and diligent and sometimes it just doesn't strike sparks. After a while you begin to understand that writing well is not a promised reward for being virtuous. No, every time you do it you're stepping off into darkness and hoping for some light. You can be faithful, work hard, not waste your talents in drink, and still not have it happen.

Tobias Wolff
Writers are superstitious. I don't mean knock on wood, throw salt over the shoulder—let me try to explain. I began this whole writing enterprise with the idea that you go to work in the morning like a banker, then the work gets done.

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

Tobias Wolff
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
Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

Tobias Wolff
You boys know what tropism is, it's what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it - you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.

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

Tobias Wolff
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

Tobias Wolff
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
We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

Tobias Wolff