Winton Quotes

#1. We all go back to our roots. My father went to the central west, went to Ilfracombe in 1919. He was the manager of the wool scour there. And, Ilfracombe was right at the heart of Australia's great wool industry, and my mother was a teacher at Winton.

Quentin Bryce

#2. I couldn't choose a favourite author, but two contemporary writers who have never disappointed me are Tim Winton and Alice Munro.

Mariella Frostrup

#3. She wondered if you could love someone too much. If you could it wasn't fair. People didn't have a chance. Love was all you had in the end. It was like sleep, like clean water. When you fell off the world there was still love because love made the world. That's what she believed. That's how it was.

Tim Winton

#4. Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death.

Tim Winton

#5. He was poor and foolish and people will always have a place in their hearts for the harmless.

Tim Winton

#6. I meant to slip away, he said, busking it now.

Tim Winton

#7. I once believed soft, warm, beautiful things could never flourish in an environment of hard concrete and cold, dark bricks.

Tom Winton

#8. It's impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.

Tim Winton

#9. It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

Tim Winton

#10. 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

#11. People are fools, not monsters

Tim Winton

#12. I respond very easily to outside events. One's life is a matter of chance. Nothing that you've arranged for yourself works out.

Nicholas Winton

#13. Shit, he said as a great, green glut of water poured up at our feet. I wonder what the ordinary people are doin today.

Tim Winton

#14. It gets a bit boring talking about the same thing for a hundred years.

Nicholas Winton

#15. 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

#16. I wasn't heroic because I was never in danger.

Nicholas Winton

#17. The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

Tim Winton

#18. Thinks the sun shines out yer clacker.

Tim Winton

#19. Was this what he wanted? Some sort of domesticated bliss? Yes. He decided. He wasted it all. The whole gift wrapped Christmas Catalog Family Package.

Michele De Winton

#20. 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

#21. Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers

Tim Winton

#22. People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

Tim Winton

#23. It's dark already and I'm out here again, talking, telling the story to the quiet night.

Tim Winton

#24. Genre? What's that?

June Winton

#25. 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

#26. It's sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.

Tim Winton

#27. That eye ... was like a fuckin hole in the universe

Tim Winton

#28. Hoping is what people do when they're too lazy to do anything else. People

Tim Winton

#29. Everyone thinks my story should be marked by heroism, but there was no risk to myself. You see, no-one in Prague at that time thought they were going to be at war with England.

Nicholas Winton

#30. I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

Tim Winton

#31. If something's not impossible, there must be a way of doing it,

Nicholas Winton

#32. 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

#33. Old Scully, who according to Jennifer, hadn't the imagination to think the worst. Something she said once, as though neurosis was an artform.

Tim Winton

#34. And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

Tim Winton

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

Tim Winton

#36. 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

#37. The past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.

Tim Winton

#38. Don't be content in your life just to do no wrong, be prepared every day to try and do some good.

Nicholas Winton

#39. The night is full of stories. They float up like miasmas, as though the dead leave their dreams in the earth where you bury them, only to have them rise to meet you in sleep. Mostly the scenes are familiar, but sometimes everything is strange, the people unknown.

Tim Winton

#40. I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living

Tim Winton

#41. Time to experiment. Necessity being the motherfucker of whatever is in its way.

Tim Winton

#42. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.

Tim Winton

#43. There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em.

Tim Winton

#44. I know crowds of people who go to church and the synagogue who aren't religious.

Nicholas Winton

#45. There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.

Tim Winton

#46. Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake.

Tim Winton

#47. He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed.

Tim Winton

#48. I've always enjoyed doing work that intrudes, or helps people.

Nicholas Winton

#49. Nicolas Morganti had stalked back into her life, stamped his foot, and demanded to stay.

Michele De Winton

#50. When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn't belong anywhere, ... It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed ... , that's where I belonged, that was my country.

Tim Winton

#51. I work on the motto that if something's not impossible, there must be a way to do it.

Nicholas Winton

#52. You look great, he said. Oh, get fucked, she said, grinning.

Tim Winton

#53. The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.

Tim Winton

#54. 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

#55. It's how I fill the time when nothing's happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

Tim Winton

#56. 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

#57. Keely's pulse quickened. A stab of apprehension. He was the same at any live performance, suddenly anxious for the players. So stupid; these people were professional muscicians. But the way his throat narrowed they could have all been kds at a school recital. His kids.

Tim Winton

#58. Ever since I was quite young, I was in St. John's Ambulance or the Red Cross; latterly, I've been involved in voluntary work with the mentally handicapped and Abbeyfield Old People's Homes.

Nicholas Winton

#59. I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

Tim Winton

#60. Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity.

Tim Winton

#61. I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have

Tim Winton

#62. Here, said the nuggety bald fixture. You look dry as a camel's cookie.

Tim Winton

#63. Keep the day ahead of you, that's what the old man used to say.

Tim Winton

#64. You can hide in someone else's rage - it blinds them

Tim Winton

#65. 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

#66. Rare as rocking-horse turds, these days, feeling halfway to decent, with barely a sick twinge, and he was damned if he'd waste

Tim Winton

#67. Inside those waves our voices bounced back at us, deeper and larger for all the noise, like the voices of men.

Tim Winton

#68. And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.

Tim Winton

#69. Hunting and gathering are in my blood. But I've lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw - or assumed - an endless bounty.

Tim Winton

#70. Some people revel in taking risks, and some go through life taking no risks at all.

Nicholas Winton

#71. I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems.

Tim Winton

#72. You never finish writing a novel, you eventually abandon it.

Tom Winton

#73. Everyone will tell you your goal is impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful. So you hang tough. You back yourslef and only yourself.

Tim Winton