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"The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form."
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"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
"June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. Messages were passing from the Fleet to the Admiralty. Arlington Street and Piccadilly seemed to chafe the very air in the Park and lift its leaves hotly, brilliantly, on waves of that divine vitality which Clarissa loved. To dance, to ride, she had adored all that."
"As far as now I can tell that most Stephen King fans don't know him well. They have read or viewed few works and their judge is based on them... that's now well knowing a writer!"
"Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature."
"Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn't blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen."
"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago."
"I read it a lot, whenever I find it in a library. Partly because I find new things every time I read it, but also because these BOOKS are always there for me. All of them are there for me. My life changes all the time, but books don't change. My reading of them changes-I can bring new things to them each time. But the words are familiar words. The world is a place you've been before, and it welcomes you back."
"This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again."
Explore more quotes by Tobias Wolff
"There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off."
"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."
"Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented."
"Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing."
"There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody."
"Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again."
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