Life & Wisdom Quote by Tobias Wolff

Restlessness is doing double duty here: it’s both the occupational hazard and the engine. Wolff frames dissatisfaction not as a tragic flaw but as a working condition, the low-grade irritant that keeps a writer from settling for the first draft of a life, or a sentence. The parenthetical confession - “and I’m one of them” - is key. It’s an intimacy move that also functions as credentialing: he’s not diagnosing writers from afar, he’s admitting complicity, even cost.

The line “a little hard to live with” smuggles in the domestic ledger. Writing is often romanticized as solitary genius; Wolff drags it back into kitchens and relationships, where perpetual self-scrutiny can read like moodiness or contempt for the ordinary. That’s the subtext: dissatisfaction doesn’t stay on the page. It leaks. Yet he refuses to moralize. He calls it a “goad,” a pointed, almost agricultural metaphor, suggesting craft as labor and improvement as something you’re prodded into, not gifted.

What makes the quote work is its calibrated ambivalence. Wolff neither celebrates unhappiness nor pretends contentment is compatible with serious revision. “Alert and restless” sounds like a creative virtue until you hear the insomnia in it. In the context of Wolff’s fiction - so attentive to self-deception, small ethical pivots, and the stories people tell to survive - dissatisfaction reads less like insecurity and more like vigilance. It’s the refusal to let easy narratives stand, including the comforting one where the artist is finally “done.”