Tim Winton Quotes

There is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I would prefer to be doing. I am at the beach looking west with the continent behind me as the sun tracks down to the sea. I have my bearings.

The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.

We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.

The desert is a spiritual place, we vaguely understand, and the sea the mere playground of our hedonism.

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

Overfishing is an obvious threat to our capacity to feed ourselves.

It's impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.

Hunting and gathering are in my blood. But I've lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw - or assumed - an endless bounty.

Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water.

If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.

When I was a girl I had this strong feeling that I didn't belong anywhere,... It was in my head, what I thought and dreamt, what I believed..., that's where I belonged, that was my country.

It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about.

It's dark already and I'm out here again, talking, telling the story to the quiet night.

Surfers are the canaries down the mine. Those of us who surf spend more time than anyone soaking in whatever the sea has become. We're suspended in consequences, you might say.

Humour is God's special gift to humanity. Handy, because it turns out to be necessary.

It's sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.

It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

The health of our seas determines the future of humanity.

Surfing is one of the most joyful pursuits a human can take up. But there's no joy in a deadzone. If you've ever surfed in turds and medical waste you don't want to repeat the experience.

Different tenses and perspectives offer you different things. It helps to distinguish the world that they are in.

Wherever I went I felt like the last person awake in a room full of sleepers

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

I grew up in a family that believed love was at work in the world. I guess that's a religious idea, though of course it needn't be.

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

The end of the world begins in the sea we love.

People are fools, not monsters

I was in my thirties before I learnt that I too would prefer not to see what I could no longer have

We live in specific places. We are marked by a place.

Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.

It is hard for me to speak of themes. I like the reader to do that. Otherwise it feels like writing a 3rd grade essay on someone else's work.

I eat green ants often enough. They are wonderful. The trick is to squash them before you eat them, otherwise they bite your tongue and it ruins the experience.

A problem not so well understood is the growing presence of plastics in the marine food chain. If we don't make big changes fast, the fish we do save may no longer be safe to eat.

Who wants to be reputable? That's for golfers and tycoons with a sleazy past.

People can make symbolic gestures but doesn't mean their life changes. One philanthropic moment doesn't make a life of renewal; of change.

What I'm saying so badly is we're bred now to believe we're in control and should be in control.

Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake.

Doing nothing is making certain you lose. Which is just gutless.

I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.

Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.

Optimism is necessary even if you don't instinctively feel it.

In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.

Whatever you believe, you need faith to get through the day.

The notion that love is abroad in the world has shaped my life.

The blank page doesn't bother me. It's the voice in my head (not always my own) that gives me the yips. It's worse when I'm not making stuff up.

There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em.

...the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.