Quotes About Toltz

#1. Let's not mince words: the inside of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace's underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade.

Steve Toltz

#2. I can't sit through dinner with somebody I don't like.

Steve Toltz

#3. Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo -

Steve Toltz

#4. If I've written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It's like I need eight hours to do two hours' work.

Steve Toltz

#5. Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

Steve Toltz

#6. When people come up to me and say, 'I read your book,' I'm thinking, 'How dare you! Who gave you a copy?'

Steve Toltz

#7. 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

#8. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory.

Steve Toltz

#9. Remembering the past is like watching a Hollywood movie, in that you never see the characters go to the toilet.

Steve Toltz

#10. A city is a strange place for dawn. The sun just can't seem to make any headway in the cold streets

Steve Toltz

#11. All this time I had thought my son was striving to be my mirror opposite, but he wasn't - he had become my polar opposite instead, and that had sent him careering away.

Steve Toltz

#12. Love is hard work.

Steve Toltz

#13. 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

#14. There's freedom in looking crazy.

Steve Toltz

#15. It's important to always take sides. Both sides,

Steve Toltz

#16. She always had the outward appearance of indifference, which I suspect is the real secret to longevity. That or a genuine desire to die.

Steve Toltz

#17. I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.

Steve Toltz

#18. Don't be afraid to have nothing.

Steve Toltz

#19. With medical science improving at roughly the same rate as our environmental situation worsens, the most likely scenario is that the world will become uninhabitable at the precise moment the human race becomes immortal.

Steve Toltz

#20. It would annoy me to be killed by someone who doesn't especially hate me as an individual, or who I didn't personally betray.

Steve Toltz

#21. I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression.

Steve Toltz

#22. I'm just a battler, which means it'll be us against the world, and the world will probably
win hands down every time, but we'll never give up fighting, no matter what, how does that sound?

Steve Toltz

#23. Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?

Steve Toltz

#24. We were lazy people on an adventure, flirting with life but too shy to go all the way.

Steve Toltz

#25. There's nothing I would do again the same, and if given the opportunity, I would decline the opportunity.

Steve Toltz

#26. If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

Steve Toltz

#27. We drank for another hour and I mutilated many of my most coherent thoughts by putting them into words.

Steve Toltz

#28. I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem.

Steve Toltz

#29. Come on, just say, "I do." It comes from the verb "to do." That's all you need for now. Then we'll move you on to "I did.

Steve Toltz

#30. Morrell turned his head upward as if to appraise the azure, featureless sky and nodded, apparently approving of God's use of negative space.

Steve Toltz

#31. Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

Steve Toltz

#32. Don't be sad for me unless you're prepared to be sad your whole lives. Otherwise forget it. What good's a couple of hard weeks of tears and regret if a month later you're laughing again? No, forget it. Just forget it.

Steve Toltz

#33. ... 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.

Steve Toltz

#34. Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it's more exhausting than lifting pianos.

Steve Toltz

#35. There's only one common element that united every writer I've admired ... they're all incredibly well-read.

Steve Toltz

#36. As I left my cab in the traffic jam, the driver made it clear he didn't like it that I was ending our relationship so unexpectedly

Steve Toltz

#37. Sex: the match that sets off human firework.

Steve Toltz

#38. I resisted a strong impulse to pluck out my eye and show it to them.

Steve Toltz

#39. Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.

Steve Toltz

#40. It's rare to get so attached to another human being in adulthood.

Steve Toltz

#41. I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he's so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.

Steve Toltz

#42. I don't 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

#43. I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

Steve Toltz

#44. The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.

Steve Toltz

#45. When it comes to taking your own life, preparation is procrastination.

Steve Toltz

#46. I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do, and actually failed.

Steve Toltz

#47. Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race?

Steve Toltz

#48. 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.

Steve Toltz

#49. I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

Steve Toltz

#50. I try to assure myself that "everyone's in debt nowadays" but the fact of it being an epidemic doesn't help one iota, any more than the knowledge of being swept up in a fatal plague would aid in any practical way the infected individual.

Steve Toltz

#51. We were on our way to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men inside them.

Steve Toltz

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

Steve Toltz

#53. I know you're supposed to hide your influences, but I suppose I see writing as riffing, really, about whatever you have been reading or thinking about that day or that week.

Steve Toltz

#54. On day after class he asked me to wait behind.

Steve Toltz

#55. People always say, 'Write what you know', but I've always found that to be terrible advice. It's quite limiting, what you know.

Steve Toltz

#56. 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

#57. Feeling like the last sober man in a crazed nation that ran on booze.

Steve Toltz

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

Steve Toltz

#59. Apparently they died from overfeeding. Apparently I overfed them. Apparently fish are terrible glutons with absolutely no self-control who just don't know when they've had enough and will stuff themselves to death with those innocuous little beige flakes imaginatively labeled 'fish food.

Steve Toltz

#60. To my horror principles have wormed their way into [the] fabric of my being.

Steve Toltz

#61. Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

Steve Toltz

#62. As I passed through the gates, the blistered hands of nostalgia gave my heart a good squeeze and I realized you miss shit times as well as good times, because at the end of the day what you're really missing is just time itself.

Steve Toltz

#63. The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.

Steve Toltz

#64. I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.

Steve Toltz

#65. I felt an attack of my most chronic illness - the pain of missing out.

Steve Toltz

#66. It made no sense to me that people would hate the very thing they aspired to become.

Steve Toltz

#67. We know what country this is: It's the stupid place where twenty-plus million people boast about being ordinary.

Steve Toltz

#68. I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

Steve Toltz

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

Steve Toltz

#70. [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

#71. I dug out an old brown suitcase and threw a few clothes into it, then looked around my bedroom for memorabilia, but stopped when I remembered that the purpose of memorabilia is to trigger memory. I didn't want to be lugging my memories all over the place. They were to heavy.

Steve Toltz

#72. I didn't think anyone who had to demand respect ever got it.

Steve Toltz

#73. It seems that in our society Christianity has made permanent inroads in the eye-for-an-eye department but has made little progress on the practical application of forgiveness.

Steve Toltz

#74. I made some probably very cringe-worthy short films that shall hopefully never make the light of day.

Steve Toltz

#75. There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

Steve Toltz

#76. People are not mysterious because they never shut up!

Steve Toltz

#77. I think as you get older, there are things that there's just no light side to, but you know, I guess the more you empathise with people, the more empathy you have, the less you are able to see the lighter side.

Steve Toltz

#78. I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.

Steve Toltz

#79. We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.

Steve Toltz

#80. 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

#81. We just didn't get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac's nightmare! A narcissist's dream! We didn't know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed.

Steve Toltz

#82. existence is humiliation, anyway.

Steve Toltz

#83. Tell me, sonny, what do you think makes good army material?" the recruiting officer asked. "Light cotton?

Steve Toltz

#84. The world's not falling apart imperceptibly anymore, these days it makes a loud shredding noise!

Steve Toltz

#85. 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

#86. I haven't been part of the criminal world.

Steve Toltz

#87. Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration.

Steve Toltz

#88. Nuclear energy is a waste of time. They should go about harnessing the power of the unconscious when it is in the act of denying Death.

Steve Toltz

#89. A life strategy of minimizing regrets only winds up guaranteeing you suffer the maximum.

Steve Toltz

#90. 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.

Steve Toltz

#91. Don't touch me, you fat ghost!

Steve Toltz

#92. When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.

Steve Toltz

#93. 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.

Steve Toltz

#94. I thought how I hate any kind of mob - I hate mobs of sports fans, mobs of environmental demonstrators, I even hate mobs of super-models, that's how much I hate mobs. I tell you, mankind is bearable only when you get him on his own.

Steve Toltz

#95. Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.

Steve Toltz

#96. Negotiating with memories isn't easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?

Steve Toltz

#97. I couldn't get my head around it. She'd lied to me! She had lied to me! Me! I was supposed to be the liar in this relationship!

Steve Toltz

#98. Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you'll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children!

Steve Toltz

#99. The Buddhists are right. Guilty men are not sentenced to death, they are sentenced to life.

Steve Toltz