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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.

Steve Toltz

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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Great
Getting
Story
Means
Facts
Reality
Stories
Together
Putting
Mean
Respect

More quotes by Steve Toltz

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I dont really have an office or anything, and I like to have to move location every two hours. So I just kind of write in a park, on a bench, in the library, in a cafe, back to the library, that kind of thing.
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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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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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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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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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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When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.
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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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.
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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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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Generally as a rule I am not. Unless I am super in love with a particular author, because I just want to read masterpieces. I just want to read one amazing book after another. As a completist you are generally reading the bad ones.
Steve Toltz
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Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.
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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Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.
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 wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
Steve Toltz
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Friendships are an unforseeable burden.
Steve Toltz
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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.
Steve Toltz