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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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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Extremely
Extremes
Unless
Laughing
Exaggeration
Funny
Pessimism
Persons
Whereas
Person
Extreme
Optimism

More quotes by Steve Toltz

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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.
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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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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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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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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
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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!
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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 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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I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.
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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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.
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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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Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.
Steve Toltz
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I enjoy being influenced by other writers.
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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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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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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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