Tobias Wolff

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best”

“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 later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.”

“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.”

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

“There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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