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"When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else."
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"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."
"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."
"Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it."
"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."
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."
"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."
"Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else."
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