Tobias Wolff Quotations

That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.

Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.

Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.

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.

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

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

The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.

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.

I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now.