Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tim Winton
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 4
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Perth
Australia
Timothy John Winton
Limit
Utterances
Someone
Describe
Surfer
Without
Nonsense
Utterance
Hard
Limits
Clich
Writing
Convey
Thing
Tough
Sensation
Think
Activity
Mystical
Thinking
Pretty
Sensations
Resorting
People
Actually

More quotes by Tim Winton

Image
In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.
Tim Winton
Image
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
Image
The health of our seas determines the future of humanity.
Tim Winton
Image
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
Image
The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.
Tim Winton
Image
Whatever you believe, you need faith to get through the day.
Tim Winton
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When you're surfing you're not thinking about where you parked the car or what you're going to do when you grow up or what you're going to buy when you've got lots of money. You know, you're just there. You're in the moment. And I think in a contemporary world, that's a rare privilege.
Tim Winton
Image
Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake.
Tim Winton
Image
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
Image
We are all part of that global traffic and I think that the effort to make yourself understood and to be not a problem for anyone or to hide your own particuarly is a mistake. I think people will and do value individuality.
Tim Winton
Image
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
Image
The end of the world begins in the sea we love.
Tim Winton
Image
Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.
Tim Winton
Image
We live in specific places. We are marked by a place.
Tim Winton