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What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.

Steve Toltz

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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Giving
Dying
Real
Realize
Men
Realizing
Dies
Lasts
Last
Wish
Nasty
Doesn
Cruelty

More quotes by Steve Toltz

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Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.
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I enjoy being influenced by other writers.
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On the one hand I'm writing about somebody about whom I say in the book, The only thing worse than being a statistic is being a statistical anomaly. So I'm writing about a particularly unlucky person. So that's a special type of hell, to be particularly unlucky.
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I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.
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You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.
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Optimism isnt funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. Its exaggeration.
Steve Toltz
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I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.
Steve Toltz
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Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you? but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?
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We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.
Steve Toltz
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There are a lot of artists that return to the same subject. Whether it's the natural subject, or the focus or the subconscious focus of their entire lives, it often is repeated.
Steve Toltz
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I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.
Steve Toltz
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Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
Steve Toltz
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The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on.
Steve Toltz
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People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.
Steve Toltz
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After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don't have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!
Steve Toltz
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To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.
Steve Toltz
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Friendships are an unforseeable burden.
Steve Toltz
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Don't be afraid to have nothing.
Steve Toltz
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We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them.
Steve Toltz
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There are men put on this earth to make laws designed to break the spirits of men. There are those put here to have their spirits broken by those put here to break them. Then there are those who are here to break the laws that break the men who break the spirits of other men. I am one of those men. - Harry West
Steve Toltz