Steve Toltz quotes:

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

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.

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.

Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

...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.

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!

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.

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

" 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 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.

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

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.

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

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

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

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."

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?

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

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.

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.

Existence is humiliation, anyway.

Don't be afraid to have nothing.

Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

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.

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."

Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race?

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

[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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I haven't been part of the criminal world,

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?

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.

Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.