Tobias Wolff Quotes

When you do a slasher film, you find yourself repeating the same kind of scene, then it becomes not very challenging and not very interesting.

Too many new writers dress up old cliches.

Comedians tend to find a comfort zone and stay there and do lamer versions of themselves for the rest of their career.

What's wrong with hip-hop [is that] it became so one-dimensional; it became like a businessman thing. It's run out of creativity. It went so far off about making money that now everyone can do it.

What can I but enumerate old themes?

I don't want to say the same lines every night.

The problem as you get older is, from my perspective, after a certain amount of songs, you tend to start writing something and then you stop and say, 'Wait, I think I've written that before.'

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has already been made.

I don't want to be totally repetitive and doing the same thing over and over again for the rest of my life. I don't want to do that at all.

You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.

I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

If you do the same thing too often, it gets to be the only thing you can do.

People make sequels a lot in Hollywood, and sometimes it feels like there's never an original thought.

We come too late to say anything which has not been said already.

The worst art is when it's really convenient and comfy.

It's really rare in TV not to think, 'Well, I've seen a version of this before.'

With all due respect to 'The Vampire Diaries,' doing the same thing, over and over again, for essentially five years straight, it really becomes laborious and tedious, and it becomes a job. You obviously find gratification in acting, but you're playing the same character. No matter how compelling it is, it starts feeling pretty monotonous.

One of my big fears is people saying my songs are all starting to sound the same.

What's so fun about doing the same thing again and again? You can only slap the handcuffs on a guy so many times.

I just think that a metal band covering a bunch of metal songs is so boring, so 'done before.'

I hate anything that seems like something that has been done.