Quote

The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, everything he finds is a sign of trouble. The writer is the same without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people's lives with grim fascination.

Tim Winton

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Tim Winton
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 4
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Perth
Australia
Timothy John Winton
Trouble
Beach
Work
Lines
Sign
People
Looking
Picks
Lives
Line
Grim
Writer
Tide
Nature
Pieces
Fascination
Everything
Goes
Tides
Without
Bits
Finds
Nothing

More quotes by Tim Winton

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I don't consciously watch and file lived moments for my work. I have a couple of writer friends who do that and it creeps me out, to be honest. I know people think I must do that too, but I don't. But I do have a long memory.
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
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We live in specific places. We are marked by a place.
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I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have
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And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.
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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We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.
Tim Winton
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I eat green ants often enough. They are wonderful. The trick is to squash them before you eat them, otherwise they bite your tongue and it ruins the experience.
Tim Winton
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Overfishing is an obvious threat to our capacity to feed ourselves.
Tim Winton
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The end of the world begins in the sea we love.
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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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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Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers
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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I wanted to be a writer all my life. Since I was 10. And then at a certain point I began to assume I was one, which is rich, I know. I didn't meet a writer until I was nearly an adult, so I had no idea what I'd bet the farm on.
Tim Winton
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The health of our seas determines the future of humanity.
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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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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There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.
Tim Winton
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In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.
Tim Winton