Tobias Wolff Quotes

Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important

Intellectual ''work'' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.

Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking.

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

You don't have to think exactly like me. When people go, "I don't agree with everything you say," you know what, if you agree with everything anyone says, you're an idiot.

I have always wanted to write in such a way that will make people think, Why, I've always thought that but never found the words for it.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought is the equivalent of labour, for I have devoted to it almost all of my waking hours. But if work is interpreted to be a definite performance in a specified time according to a rigid rule, then I may be the worst of idlers.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

I hate to tell people what they should think 'cause I really have an aversion when people tell me what to think.

The left are afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

I think that's more a reflection of the fact I've never been a student of any particular school of writing, or even listening.