top of page
Exlpore more Time quotes

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

"The future is what matters - because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present - like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot."

"Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood."

"So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
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."
bottom of page