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.
A novel invites digression and a little relaxation of the grip because a reader can't endure being held that tightly in hand for so long a time.
Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.
Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.