Steve Toltz Quotes

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All quotes by Steve Toltz: Books Character Children Dreams Memories Writing more...
  • I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

  • 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.

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

    Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”
  • Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

    Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.8, Spiegel & Grau
  • 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 (2008). “A fraction of the whole”
  • ...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.

    Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”
  • … 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 (2008). “A fraction of the whole”
  • 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.

    Writing  
    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • 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 actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do and actually failed.

    Writing  
    "Word travel with Steve Toltz". Interview with Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. October 8, 2008.
  • 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 (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.214, Spiegel & Grau
  • There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

  • I was in the hospital and I was paralyzed and I went through all of these things. I've had all of these crazy experiences and jobs in my life, but I never really write about them because I've already told them as stories to friends. For me, the process of writing is the process of invention. But the hospital story felt told already. There was nothing to discover in the telling of it. The discovery had to be in the form. It wasn't really the unfamiliarity of the form, it was more about a way incorporate invention and how to realize it imaginatively.

    Writing  
    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • I dont 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.

    Moving   Writing  
  • 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.

    Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”
  • 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.

    Moving   Character   Fake  
    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

    Writing  
    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • Sometimes I think the human animal doesn't really need food or water to survive, only gossip.

    Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.369, Spiegel & Grau
  • ...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 (2008). “A fraction of the whole”
  • 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 (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.13, Spiegel & Grau
  • 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.

    Writing  
    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • If you wanted to pursue some kind of artistic pursuit and you had another career, then you would definitely fall back on it because it would take so long. I never believed I could do two things at once. The jobs I had were minimum wage jobs that you wouldn't want to pursue for too long, or that couldn't really take over your life.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • I haven't been part of the criminal world.

  • 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.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • 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.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • 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

    Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.132, Spiegel & Grau
  • I have that sort of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David/George Costanza thing where people are like, "How did you feel writing such an unlikable character?" And I'm like, "It's me! I based him on myself!" There are certain moments where they do feel like unwittingly personal attacks.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • 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 (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.37, Spiegel & Grau
  • 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.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.

    Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.329, Spiegel & Grau
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    Steve Toltz quotes about: Books Character Children Dreams Memories Writing