Top Steve Toltz Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Steve Toltz Biography

Steve Toltz (born in 1972 in Sydney) is an Australian novelist.

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Steve Toltz Quotes

[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.

Heart, Looks, Rain, Teach, Windows

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

Fiction, Guarantee, Say, Truthful, Writing

I believe everything is autobiographical. If it's not strictly about you, it's your peers, your obsessions, things that make you angry, or things that you've been watching or obsessing about. Preoccupying you for reasons you don't necessarily know, but it's about you. It says a lot about you. It's like when someone tells you their dream and you sit there going, "Do you realize how much you're revealing about yourself right now?" It's kind of embarrassing.

Believe, Dream, Kind, Know, Right, Watching

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?

Bridges, Children, Following, Jumping, Stop

… she gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness: uninvited and tireless.

Combined, Day, Jehovah, Looks, Memories, Memory

He pointed the gun at me. Then he looked up at my hand & tilted his head slightly. - Journey, he said. I had forgotten I was still holding the book. - Céline, I said back in a whisper. - I love that book. - I'm only halfway through. - Have you got to the point where -- - Hey, kill me, but don't tell me the end!

Book, Celine, Gun, Journey, Looked, Tilted

There are authors like David Foster Wallace or Raymond Chandler - with voice-based authors I might end up a completist, because what I love about them isn't just the particular construction of one novel or another but their flavor. There is an Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, as well. One book is not necessarily greater than another book, but they just have this incredible, unique voice, so it doesn't really matter which one you read.

Book, Incredibles, Novel, Read, Unique

Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

Burden, Friendships, Unforseeable

That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.

Home, Problems, Source, Stupid, War

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.

Book, Masterpiece, Reading, Rule, Super

Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

Amen, Buttons, Email, Like, Send

There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.

Book, Mechanism, Real, Say, Things, Thinking

Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.

Burning, Freedom, People, Thinking, Throw

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.

Artist, Difficulty, Discomfort, Uncomfortable, Use

To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.

Child, Children, Impaled, Responsibility, Spike

I am influenced by books which dont have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

Book, Entertaining, Eye, Page, Trying

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.

Bangs, Exists, Leafy, Office, Shrubs

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.

Came, Empty, Ifs, Leave, Regret, Wouldnt

. . . I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.

Blasphemous, God, Ifs, Kitsch, Rainbow, Wondered

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.

Death, Die, Dozen, Fully, Love You, Might

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