Tobias Wolff

But a lot of writers – and I’m one of them – do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it’s a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Tobias Wolff

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.

Tobias Wolff

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.

Tobias Wolff

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

Tobias Wolff

Just don’t lose the magic.

Tobias Wolff

Most of us don’t live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.

Tobias Wolff

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.

Tobias Wolff