Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolffis an American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Lifeand In Pharaoh's Army. He has written two novels, including The Barracks Thief, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1945
CityBirmingham, AL
CountryUnited States of America
We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
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.
Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
I was giving up--being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.
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.
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.
Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
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.
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.
There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
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.
One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.
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.
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.