Tobias Wolff Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“You don't teach information in a writing workshop.”

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

“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.”

“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.”