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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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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Undetectable
Deterioration
Constant
Sick
Physical
Health
Mean
Always

More quotes by Steve Toltz

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My writing goal is just this desperation to get as much done as possible. It's never a comfortable, relaxed thing. Especially because I know so much of the story that I want to tell and I feel so far away from the end. Actually feels a hundred years away, and every hour I'm not working is another hour away from finishing.
Steve Toltz
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Fear of death is understandable, being that we are all going to die, but fear of life and suffering is more of an irrational fear because it's something that can be avoided. The torturous part is that suffering can be avoided if you have good luck. That's somewhat out of our hands, but is it? I don't know. Is bad luck self-harm by another name?
Steve Toltz
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Don't be afraid to have nothing.
Steve Toltz
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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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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?
Steve Toltz
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As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.
Steve Toltz
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I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.
Steve Toltz
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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.
Steve Toltz
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[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated.
Steve Toltz
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I haven't been part of the criminal world.
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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When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.
Steve Toltz
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There's nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that the post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch.
Steve Toltz
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I enjoy being influenced by other writers.
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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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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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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...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
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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I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.
Steve Toltz