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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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Tobias Wolff
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 19
Academic
Author
Autobiographer
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff
Particular
Story
Tell
Stories
Right
Way
More quotes by Tobias Wolff
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
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
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
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
Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
Tobias Wolff
We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
Tobias Wolff
Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
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
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
Want! You must want something. What do you want?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A piece of writing is a dangerous thing, he said. It can change your life.
Tobias Wolff
You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
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
