Quotes from Tobias Wolff

You don't teach information in a writing workshop.

I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.

Want! You must want something. What do you want?

Writers, to my way of thinking, are no more free in their choices than most people. Our material chooses us; certain things engage us, certain things do not.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.

It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.

he felt no more than a boy again-but a very well-versed boy who couldn't help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.

That room - once you enter it, you never really leave. You can forget you're there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yeah even its length, will reflect the force of your character and the wisdom of your judgments. And then you hit an icy path on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands becomes a joke and you no more than a spectator to your own dreamy slide toward the verge, and then you remember where you are.

You could say that all my characters are reflections of myself, in that I share their wish to count for something, and their utmost confusion as to how this is supposed to be done.

I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.

Happiness is endless hapiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

You can't be selfish. But we men-it's a wonder we forget ourselves long enough to buy a birthday card. As for love... we can love, but we're always forgetting.

I tell you, the one thing I hate is an absolutist. I hate absolutist ideologies, I hate absolutist aesthetics, I hate absolutist theologies, they're the burden and bane of this world.

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.

Getting from La Jolla to Alta Vista State Hospital isn't easy, unless you have a car or a breakdown. April's Father had a breakdown and they got him there in no time.

The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can't be helped. But for now Anders can still make time

Want! You must want something. What do you want?

But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

She'd laugh at odd times as we talked and this flustered me pleasantly and made me laugh too, as if we both understood something we couldn't say.

It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people.

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

Storytelling is an escape from the jail of the self, leading to the ultimate adventure--seeing life through the eyes of another.