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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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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Thing
Failed
Income
Strange
Went
Actually
Firsts
First
Supplement
Writing
Supplements

More quotes by 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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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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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.
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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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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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Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.
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.
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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I haven't been part of the criminal world.
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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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 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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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
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...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
Steve Toltz