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
I'm very conscious of working from memory but I also know that someone else who was there at the same moment would write something different about it.
I have to be honest, of course, but I have to be sure that my honesty comes in a form that is not destructive because it can very easily become so.
Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
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.
We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
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.
I recall that my workshop leaders were tactful in their ways of acquainting me with my shortcomings as a writer. So much so that I hardly realized they were doing it. I want always to keep that sort of thing in mind when I'm teaching. The way you get better in everything in this life is to make mistakes. Otherwise you're probably doing it right by accident. But you have to do everything wrong before you can really start with some authority to do it right.
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.
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.
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.