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"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."
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Exlpore more Work quotes
"If you need an alarm clock, you need a new job."
"Have convictions. Be friendly. Stick to your beliefs as they stick to theirs. Work as hard as they do."
"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."
"A good work ethic is not so much a concern for hard work but rather one for responsibility. There have been a great many men and women who have in fact used work or hustle or selfish ambition as an escape from real responsibility, an escape from purpose. In matters such as these, the hard worker is just as dysfunctional as the sloth."
"Ruth Cole was a novelist, novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing."
"Speaking about work isn't working."
"You can be the most productive and most effective, but politics show up as ego, jealousy and sabotage from bosses who can't perform."
"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary."
Explore more quotes by Tobias Wolff
"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."
"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."
"Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order."
"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."
"That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program."
"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."
"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."
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