Tobias Wolff Quotes

I love being a writer. I don't really want to do anything else!

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

I'm always writing. There is always a story brewing in my head.

I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'

It's that drama that drives authors, you know.

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

Every day I fantasise about situations and little themes I see in front of me that would make a good beginning of a story. But one has to be disciplined and just sit down and do it.

I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession.

I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.