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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.

Tobias Wolff

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Tobias Wolff
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 19
Academic
Author
Autobiographer
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff
Giving
Struggle
Always
Came
Purpose
Desire
Found
Appearance
Power
Principle
Give
Reasons
Reason
Principles

More quotes by Tobias Wolff

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Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
Tobias Wolff
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But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
Tobias Wolff
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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.
Tobias Wolff
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Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
Tobias Wolff
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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.
Tobias Wolff
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What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
Tobias Wolff
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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.
Tobias Wolff
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There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
Tobias Wolff
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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.
Tobias Wolff
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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
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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.
Tobias Wolff
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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.
Tobias Wolff
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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.
Tobias Wolff
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You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
Tobias Wolff
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A piece of writing is a dangerous thing, he said. It can change your life.
Tobias Wolff
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There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
Tobias Wolff
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Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Tobias Wolff
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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
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Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
Tobias Wolff
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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.
Tobias Wolff