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To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.

Steve Toltz

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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Children
Impaled
Spike
Daily
Responsibility
Child

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The universe doesn't really care if you bounce back. It doesn't feel that weird to write about paralysis or being in hospital or losing a child or, you know, splitting up with your wife, because that's just life.
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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.
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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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Optimism isnt funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. Its exaggeration.
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I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.
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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.
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I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.
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We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them.
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Friendships are an unforseeable burden.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
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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 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
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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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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