Christos Tsiolkas Quotes

I couldn't admit to any of the boys I hung out with that I wanted to fuck 'em, so my erotic life was in my imagination and in the body.

Dan had discovered that he had been mistaken, that books did not exist outside of the body and only in mind, but that words were breath, that they were experienced and understood through the inseparability of mind and body, that words were the water and reading was swimming. Just as he had in water, he could lose himself in reading: mind and body became one.

Being working class wasn't about words, it could only be expressed through the body.

Hugo pulled away from Rosie's teat. 'No one is allowed to touch my body without my permission.' His voice was shrill and confident. Hector wondered where he learnt those words. From Rosie? At child care? Were they community announcements on the frigging television?

Homesickness hits hardest in the middle of a crowd in a large, alien city.

Transcendence is realising that people do not deserve pity or love or compassion. People deserve contempt.

Discomfort is sometimes what is most precious to me about great art.

I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.

The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.

You didn't always have to give it back. And in that cold, somber chapel, Dan Kelly discovered that there were some things that you could not be forgiven for, and those were the things that you carried into the next life, if there was such a place; and if there was no next life nor any God, the consequence was the same: if you were not forgiven, you would die with regret.

His hard cock in one hand. The roof of the caravan is low and he has to crouch. I film his face, move

What's domesticity? Breakfast in bed? The cuckold going to shoot his wife? Does one inevitably lead to the other? I'm asking because there are no rules anymore and I don't want to end up fucked up. I don't want to destroy anyone through my love. But I don't want to end up chasing intimacy from strangers either.

He wanted to say that he'd learned to read in gaol [jail], to really read. He wanted to tell her that the library had been his favorite place inside, that when he read 'As I Lay Dying' he'd found a voice that made sense of time and space as he was experiencing it in gaol, that it had spoken to him more clearly and more profoundly than any voice he'd ever encountered before: of how the past could not be separated from memory, of how it was not only time that changed people, but memory as well.

Once you lose someone's respect it is the hardest thing to win back

She did not want the pleasurable and comfortable mediocrity in which she now wallowed to be the sum of her life.

I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.

Everything is fair in love and art.

I want two scars, one on each of my shoulder blades."
He shrugged in confusion. "What do you mean?"
"Two scars," I repeated, "for where my wings used to be, where my wings were torn away from me.