Tobias Wolff Quotes

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

I'm not a writer who teaches. I'm a teacher who writes.

I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.

When it began I wrote this passionate letter to people I knew, studio members, of course, and other people with whom we have worked over the years and I said come and teach our students.

Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

I've been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I've been an editor on magazines.

I think I finally chose the graduate degree in engineering primarily because it only took one year and law school took three years, and I felt the pressure of being a little behind - although I was just 22.

I'm starting to teach now: I teach in the graduate film program at NYU and next year I'm going to be teaching at Los Angeles at the film program and English program at UCLA.

Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.

I often run teaching down in my standup, but I had some great years, and it's a great job. It represented a place where I knew what I wanted to do but didn't have the courage.

Teachers have been some of the most important people in my career.

I love working with teachers and principals; they are my heroes. They are very dedicated to children, and it's very impactful.

I was gonna try to go to grad school to teach foreign language.

Getting that degree is something that is very important to me and my family.

Me, a teacher? No way!

If you want to be able to teach, then you need to listen - a lot.

I do believe that mentorship is something I did not get in school, and I don't think it exists in school in a sufficient way.

I feel like I'd be a really good teacher. I would go for middle school... those high schoolers would be difficult to deal with.

I went to Columbia film school; that's where I met Matthew Weisman. We then became writing partners, graduated, and moved out to Los Angeles. I didn't know a soul.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.

If I hadn't become a professional basketball player, I would have become a history teacher. There's so much to learn from history.

The things taught in schools & colleges are not an education but the means of education.

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.