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I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

Steve Toltz

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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Enjoy
Influenced
Writers

More quotes by 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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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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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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Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
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 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 haven't been part of the criminal world.
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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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.
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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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