Tobias Wolff Quotes

If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side.

I set myself up for a lot of trouble by wanting to tell a story that is fairly earnest and emotional and expressive, but to do it in the most subtle, realistic way.

I believe there are more films that involve love and forgiveness than violence, but they often seem fake and are almost embarrassing to watch.

When you're watching television, you don't want to watch a show where everything just works out. You don't want to see a relationship that's just blossoming and everyone's happy and sunshine and roses all the time. That's also not true in life.

I don't like to objectify the people I play. I always try to go for the truth in any part.

The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.

....we ain't doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

My ultimate goal is to try to be real. It just so happens that I'm usually more happy than sad when I'm writing. And in general I think that life is pretty great, and it's cool to be here, so that comes through in my music. I don't have a dismal outlook, but I don't aim to make positive music. It's just what I am.

The whole point about vision is that it's very individual, it's very personal, and it has to be confessional. It has to be something which hurts - the pulling out of it and putting it on the page hurts. Art can be about the individual writer's response to his or her condition, and if that response comes out of a predigested belief about what the audience wants to hear about the writer's condition, then it has no truth, it has no validity. You either write with your own blood or nobody's. Otherwise it's just ink.

How can [actors] learn their lines and be honest in front of 30 people and all the lights? It makes me cry sometimes. I can't understand how they can be joking with me 30 seconds before, and 40 seconds later they're giving me all this incredible feeling.

When you're kissing a woman and you want it to look realistic, you're thinking, 'Am I taking advantage of her? Is her boyfriend going to think I'm over-stepping the mark? Whereas when you are kissing a man, those thoughts don't cross your mind. I'm more scared of it looking false, so I went for it fully to make it look real and hopefully I've achieved that.

I'll cry at the end of the day, not with fresh makeup.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is.

I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true.

The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

I personally think that all the scene that you see, love scene, is pretty real, almost 100 percent.

I should allow only my heart to have imagination; and for the rest rely on memory, that long drawn sunset of one's personal truth.

I was expecting it to be cynical because I'm like that myself. I wouldn't want it to be all roses because life isn't like that.

That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after.

If you tell the story emotionally in a truthful way, then you start naturally looking at the landscape and thinking "Wow, we have to watch out."

I felt it's vague enough for the reader to pull their own story and their wisdom out of the poem, but for me, it's actually very painfully transparent what I've written. Sometimes very literal, which is scary.