Top 60 Tobias Wolff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are.”

— Tobias Wolff

Featured in: Persistence Quotes, Short Quotes About Life, Never Give Up Quotes, Identity Quotes

2. “The human heart is a dark forest.”

— Tobias Wolff

3. “The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.”

— Tobias Wolff

4. “Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.”

— Tobias Wolff

5. “Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.”

— Tobias Wolff

6. “You don’t teach information in a writing workshop.”

— Tobias Wolff

7. “Want! You must want something. What do you want?”

— Tobias Wolff

8. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

9. “We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.”

— Tobias Wolff

10. “I was giving up – being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.”

— Tobias Wolff

11. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

12. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

13. “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

14. “Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.”

— Tobias Wolff

15. “Because I don’t have to be careful of people’s feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I’m teaching writing.”

— Tobias Wolff

16. “But as my brother was doing his research for a book about my father, it became his opinion that the most influential anti-semitism my father encountered when he was growing up was from Jews, because his relatives were German Jews, and doctors.”

— Tobias Wolff

17. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

18. “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

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

— Tobias Wolff

20. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

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

— Tobias Wolff

22. “Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn’t mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.”

— Tobias Wolff

23. “There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.”

— Tobias Wolff

24. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

25. “I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.”

— Tobias Wolff

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

— Tobias Wolff

27. “Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.”

— Tobias Wolff

28. “One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.”

— Tobias Wolff

29. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

30. “Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn’t have much time for anything else.”

— Tobias Wolff

31. “Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.”

— Tobias Wolff

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

— Tobias Wolff

33. “Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends.”

— Tobias Wolff

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

— Tobias Wolff

35. “Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.”

— Tobias Wolff

36. “There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it’s why you want to become a writer – because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.”

— Tobias Wolff

37. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

38. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

39. “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

40. “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

41. “To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.”

— Tobias Wolff

42. “You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.”

— Tobias Wolff

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

— Tobias Wolff

44. “I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves.”

— Tobias Wolff

45. “I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry – sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.”

— Tobias Wolff

46. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

47. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

48. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff

49. “And I learned that it’s a bad idea to curse if you’re in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.”

— Tobias Wolff

50. “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.”

— Tobias Wolff