Quote

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

Steve Toltz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
Fiction
Write
Writing
Guarantee
Truthful

More quotes by Steve Toltz

Image
Fear of death is understandable, being that we are all going to die, but fear of life and suffering is more of an irrational fear because it's something that can be avoided. The torturous part is that suffering can be avoided if you have good luck. That's somewhat out of our hands, but is it? I don't know. Is bad luck self-harm by another name?
Steve Toltz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.
Steve Toltz
Image
I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.
Steve Toltz
Image
Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.
Steve Toltz
Image
I enjoy being influenced by other writers.
Steve Toltz
Image
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
Image
To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.
Steve Toltz
Image
Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.
Steve Toltz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.
Steve Toltz
Image
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