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.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

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.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

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 bring it to completion.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

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

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

Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
- Tobias Wolff Quote

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
- Tobias Wolff Quote