Steve Toltz famous quotes

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?
-- Steve Toltz

#Dream #Sick #Criminals

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

#Relationship #Talking #Piano

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

#Children #Jumping #Bridges

Amen' is like the Send button on an email.
-- Steve Toltz

#Buttons #Email #Amen

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

#Writing #Firsts #Income

… 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

#Memories #Jehovah #Looks

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

#Children #Vegas #Looks

Don't be afraid to have nothing.
-- Steve Toltz

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.
-- Steve Toltz

#Enjoy

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

#Laughing #Optimism #Pessimism

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.
-- Steve Toltz

#Arbitrary #Prize

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

#Book #Eye #Trying

I haven't been part of the criminal world,
-- Steve Toltz

#Criminals #World

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.
-- Steve Toltz

#Moving #Writing #Two

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

#Voice

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

#People #Suffering #Secret

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

#Memories #Language #Easy

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.
-- Steve Toltz

#War #Stupid #Home

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

#Real #Loss #Thinking

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

#Half #Moments #Endless

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

#Men #Law #Broken

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

#Men #Two #Way

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

#Regret #Empty

[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

#Rain #Heart #Looks

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

#Memories #Past #Thinking

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

#Thinking #People #Burning

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

#Mean #Reality #Together

Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.
-- Steve Toltz

#Kids #Parent #Blame

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

#Real #Men #Giving

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

#Eye #Airplane #Moon

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

#Jobs #Air #Games

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

#Thinking #Animal #Water

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

#Men #Giving #Honor

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.
-- Steve Toltz

#Dream #Moving #Book

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!
-- Steve Toltz

#Book #Journey #Gun

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

#Office #Shrubs #Bangs

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

#Mean #Sick #Deterioration

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

#Children #Responsibility

Friendships are an unforseeable burden.
-- Steve Toltz

#Burden

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

#Loneliness #Kissing #Laughing

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

#Rainbow #Kitsch

...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

#Sports #Hate #Environmental

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

#Thinking #Demand

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

#Memories #Memorable #Effort

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

#Love You #Dozen #Might