Tobias Wolff Quotes

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

I don't like writing essays or theory.

I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.

Being an English major prepares you for impersonating authority.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

I am a writer. Being critical is a writer's responsibility.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best.

In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.

Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.

People who read fiction are different from other people because they are people who are interested in an imagined world.

For me, when I read a book, I'm very much about detail.

The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.

Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

Read, read, read. Read good books. You will strengthen your understanding of story. Your vocabulary will be the richer for it.