Life & Wisdom Quote by Tobias Wolff

Liberty, for Wolff, is never just a lifestyle perk; its shadow twin is duty. The line starts with a sly concession - "Of course" - as if he’s brushing aside the romantic talk writers like to give about inspiration and individuality. You want to become a writer because you can. No conscription, no censor, no boss clocking your hours. But the second you claim that freedom as your reason, Wolff flips it into a moral account you now owe.

The subtext is a challenge to the comfy version of artistic freedom: if you treat liberty as a private indulgence, you’re wasting what many people never get. Wolff’s fiction is full of characters trying to wriggle out of responsibility with clever stories about themselves; he knows how seductive self-exemption is. Here, he’s warning writers against that same dodge: the freedom to choose the work is precisely what removes your alibi for not doing it well, not doing it honestly, not doing it at all.

Context matters because Wolff comes out of a postwar American tradition that treats writing less as performance and more as conscience - the workshop era, the veteran’s awareness of consequence, the belief that language can be a form of civic behavior. The sentence works because it refuses the glamour of "calling" and replaces it with something more bracing: if you’re lucky enough to have the room to write, you’re obligated to fill it with seriousness, attention, and risk. Freedom, in his view, isn’t permission; it’s a contract.