Steve Toltz Quotes

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

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.

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.

Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

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.

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.

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

Don't be afraid to have nothing.

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

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

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

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

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!

Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.

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

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

… 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.

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

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.

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

[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.

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

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

There are a lot of artists that return to the same subject. Whether it's the natural subject, or the focus or the subconscious focus of their entire lives, it often is repeated.

Once a year I try writing a poem, usually because I've read some poetry that amazed me and I want to do that.

I haven't been part of the criminal world.

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.

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

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.

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.

Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

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.

The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.

To my horror principles have wormed their way into [the] fabric of my being.