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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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Steve Toltz
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Novelist
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Sydney
NSW
Stephen Toltz
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More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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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To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.
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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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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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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I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.
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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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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Optimism isnt funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. Its exaggeration.
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'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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Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.
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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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 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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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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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