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"Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented."
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"There are poets,there are philosophers, there are spiritualists and me. I try to foot the bill of these mighty three."

"Hunger is a wayOf standing outside windowsThe entering takes away."

"Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless."

"When your speaking style is clear, confident, and concise, your listeners will perceive you as such."

"Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean."

"A loud mind is greater than a loud mouth."

"What we say has conversational value, what we do has true value for life."

"If you can weep with your words, the meaning of your heart can be written forever."

"Write the words on your heart."

"Even if you can't dance, you can shake your body. Even if you can't sing, you can make some noise."
Explore more quotes by Tobias Wolff


"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."


"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."


"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."


"Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions."


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