Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Steve Toltz

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

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

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.

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

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I haven't been part of the criminal world.

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

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.

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

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

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

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

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.

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

Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

Don't be afraid to have nothing.

My writing goal is just this desperation to get as much done as possible. It's never a comfortable, relaxed thing. Especially because I know so much of the story that I want to tell and I feel so far away from the end. Actually feels a hundred years away, and every hour I'm not working is another hour away from finishing.

Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.

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.

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.

There are men put on this earth to make laws designed to break the spirits of men. There are those put here to have their spirits broken by those put here to break them. Then there are those who are here to break the laws that break the men who break the spirits of other men. I am one of those men. - Harry West

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

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?

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!

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.

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.

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

The universe doesn't really care if you bounce back. It doesn't feel that weird to write about paralysis or being in hospital or losing a child or, you know, splitting up with your wife, because that's just life.

… 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.

I try to outline. I'm a lazy outliner. I will put the points down of each chapter or series of chapters, but it always changes. For me it's a place of evolution. I don't really know who the characters are. I don't really know what the story is. I outline and that really just gets me moving. It's like I'm drawing up fake maps, but they turn out to be correct.

Optimism isnt funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. Its exaggeration.

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.

We have this atomic idea of process where we want to believe that the creator of the book or the show had this whole brainy idea at the outset. As though there is something less about it if it comes out of the process of discovery.

I feel that there are two kinds of writers. I feel that there are writers who are storytellers and then there are those just working out their obsessions. I think I'm a combination. I think, at least for these books, I'm going with fear. I've always been interested in fear. Fear is something I've dealt with in life, and I think it's the main motivating factor of everything, almost. From sex to politics.

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.

There’s nothing wonderful or interesting about unrequited love. I think it’s shitty, just plain shitty. To love someone who doesn’t return your affections might be exciting in books, but in life it’s unbearably boring. I’ll tell you what’s exciting: sweaty, passionate nights. But sitting on the veranda outside the home of a sleeping woman who isn’t dreaming about you is slow moving and just plain sad.

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.

It's the idea of baggage. When you hear about people in their 40s boast about not having baggage. I think having no baggage is your baggage. That means that you haven't thrown yourself into the mess of life.

People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.

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

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?

Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

I've been labelled many times - a criminal, an anarchist, a rebel, sometimes human garbage, but never a philosopher, which is a pity because that's what I am. I chose a life apart from the common flow, not only because the common flow makes me sick but because I question the logic of the flow, and not only that - I don't know if the flow exists! Why should I chain myself to the wheel when the wheel itself might be a construct, an invention, a common dream to enslave us?

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.

Fear of death is understandable, being that we are all going to die, but fear of life and suffering is more of an irrational fear because it's something that can be avoided. The torturous part is that suffering can be avoided if you have good luck. That's somewhat out of our hands, but is it? I don't know. "Is bad luck self-harm by another name?"