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It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about.

Tim Winton

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Tim Winton
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 4
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Perth
Australia
Timothy John Winton
Breathing
Funny
Ever
Much
Really
Never
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Tim Winton

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Life is wild by definition. And organic existence is violent. Though I find this hard to accept. And I know it goes against the cultural grain of therapeutic smoothing so dominant in what we like to call 'cultural discourse'.
Tim Winton
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Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.
Tim Winton
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Yet however comforting and peaceful beach-combing is, it ends up like the sea, as disturbing as it is reassuring. In dark moments I believe that walking on a beach at low tide is to be looking for death, or at least anticipating it. You will only find the dead, the spilled and the cast-off. Things torn free of their life or their place.
Tim Winton
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Every great moment of social change was once a confirmed impossibility. People's determination in the face of overwhelming odds has, time and again, triumphed over what seems impossible. This is what you tell yourself.
Tim Winton
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Australia was once a leader in taking global warming seriously. The former PM [Kevin Rudd] called it 'greatest moral challenge of our time'. But in the past couple of years the national consensus has been eroded and Australians are being encouraged by the polluters and their mates in Parliament to forget it was ever mentioned. It's heartbreaking.
Tim Winton
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For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.
Tim Winton
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The end of the world begins in the sea we love.
Tim Winton
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Doing nothing is making certain you lose. Which is just gutless.
Tim Winton
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It is always amusing to me and delightful of course that my books sell so well in America and other parts of the world. I can't imagine what people must think as they read my books in Poland. Or in Hebrew and Greek. People are reading all the stories which are about bits of Western Australia.
Tim Winton
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I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.
Tim Winton
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I love the sea but it does not love me. The sea is like a desert in that it is quite rightly feared. The sea and the desert are both hungry, they have things to be getting on with so you do not go into them lightly.
Tim Winton
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In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.
Tim Winton
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In Australia surfing was for the oiks. It was always rebellious. And sadly it was for a long time a bit unreflective and macho and anti-intellectual. Unlike other sports it was essentially a youth cult, like rock and roll. But like rock and roll its people grew up.
Tim Winton
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I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.
Tim Winton
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If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.
Tim Winton
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What I'm saying so badly is we're bred now to believe we're in control and should be in control.
Tim Winton
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It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.
Tim Winton
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I don't think it's people's utterances that limit the writing. It's the activity itself. It's actually pretty hard to convey to someone who's not a surfer. The sensation is the thing. And it's tough to describe without resorting to clichés or mystical nonsense.
Tim Winton
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Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers
Tim Winton
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It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.
Tim Winton