Quotes by Tobias Wolff

About Tobias Wolff:

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has also written two novels, including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feelin...

Tobias Wolff

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.

Tobias Wolff

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.

Tobias Wolff

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.

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 end...

Tobias Wolff

Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years lat...

Tobias Wolff

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.

Tobias Wolff

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

Tobias Wolff

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 ...

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

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.

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

Tobias Wolff

Author Bio

  • NameTobias Wolff
  • DescriptionFiction writer, memoirist
  • BornJune 19, 1945
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist; Writer; Autobiographer
  • AwardsPEN/Faulkner Award For Fiction; Guggenheim Fellowship