Steve Toltz Quotes

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

existence is humiliation, anyway.

It seems that in our society Christianity has made permanent inroads in the eye-for-an-eye department but has made little progress on the practical application of forgiveness.

Don't touch me, you fat ghost!

Those books of mine really got under their skin. Ironically, they thought I was inhuman because of the way I churned through library books.
How do you know how to pick them? Who tells you?' Daved asked me once.
I explained that there was a line. 'If you read Dostoyevsky, he mentions Pushkin, and so you go and read Pushkin and he mentions Dante, and so you go and read Dante and
'
All right!'
All books are in some way about other books.'
I get it!

A city is a strange place for dawn. The sun just can't seem to make any headway in the cold streets

It's important to always take sides. Both sides,

People are not mysterious because they never shut up!

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?

A life strategy of minimizing regrets only winds up guaranteeing you suffer the maximum.

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

As I left my cab in the traffic jam, the driver made it clear he didn't like it that I was ending our relationship so unexpectedly

You've probably worked out by now that if you think courageous thoughts, you will cross busy streets without looking, and if you think sadistic, venal thoughts, you will find yourself pulling out the chair every time someone is about to sit down. You are what you think. So if you don't want to turn into your father, you don't want to think yourself into a corner like he did- you need to think yourself into the open, and the only way to do that is to enjoy not knowing whether you're right or wrong, play the game of life without trying to work out the rules. Stop judging the living, enjoy futility, don't be disillusioned with murder, remember that fasting men survive while starving men die, laugh as your illusions collapse, and above all, always bless every single minute of this silly season in hell.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

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.

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.

Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.

If I've written five pages by hand, out of those five pages, one page might be worth saving. The rest is crap. I have to throw it away. It's like I need eight hours to do two hours' work.

I believe that a person's thoughts often manifest into actual events - that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, 24-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?'
'I get it. Go on.'
'In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people's addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there's no developments is disappointed. They're checking the news two or three times a day - they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secrets parts of themselves, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don't you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.

When it comes to taking your own life, preparation is procrastination.

It occurs to me that I could learn from this child something about the nature of humanity--and if I accept Harry's pronouncement that I am a born philosopher then this baby could be an ambitious philosophical project! What if I reared it in a cupboard without light? Or in a room full of mirrors? Or Dali paintings? Apparently babies have to learn to smile so what if I never taught him or showed him laughter? No television of course no movies maybe no society either--what if he never saw another human other than me or not even me? What would happen? Would cruelty develop in that miniature universe? Would sarcasm? Would rage? Yes I could really learn something here tho why stop at one child? Could have a collective of children of "family" & alter variables in environment that will govern life of each one to see what's natural what's inevitable what's environmental & what's conditioning. Above all I will strive to raise a being that understands itself. What if I gave child head start by encouraging self-awareness at an unnaturally young age, maybe 3? Maybe earlier? Would need to create optimum conditions for flowering of self-awareness. This child will know a lot of solitude that's for sure.

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.

I couldn't think of anything other than her and the components of her. For example, her red hair. But was I so primitive I let myself be bewitched by hair? I mean, really. Hair! It's just hair! Everyone has it! She puts it up, she lets it down. So what? And why did all the other parts of her have me wheezing with delight? I mean, who hasn't got a back, or a belly, or armpits? This whole finicky obsession serves to humiliate me even as I write it, sure, but I suppose it isn't that abnormal. That's what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don't notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.

Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful byproduct: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from a very early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning.

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

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.

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!

I couldn't get my head around it. She'd lied to me! She had lied to me! Me! I was supposed to be the liar in this relationship!

I feel like I took a wrong turn but went so far down the road I didn't have the energy to turn back. Please, Martin, you must remember this. It's never too late to turn back if you make a wrong turn. Even if it takes you a decade to backtrack, you must do it. Don't get stuck because the road back seems too long or too dark. Don't be afraid to have nothing.

I felt an attack of my most chronic illness - the pain of missing out.

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

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?

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?

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.

There's freedom in looking crazy.

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

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

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

All this time I had thought my son was striving to be my mirror opposite, but he wasn't - he had become my polar opposite instead, and that had sent him careering away.

It seems to me you should be able to look at the people in your life and say "I owe you my survival" and "You owe me your survival," and if you can't say that, then what the hell are you doing with them?

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.

I dug out an old brown suitcase and threw a few clothes into it, then looked around my bedroom for memorabilia, but stopped when I remembered that the purpose of memorabilia is to trigger memory. I didn't want to be lugging my memories all over the place. They were to heavy.

I'll teach you how to decipher all the confused faces by closing your eyes & how to cringe when someone says the words 'your generation'. I will teach you how not to demonise your enemies & how to make yourself unappetising when the hordes turn up to eat you. I'll teach you how to yell with your mouth closed & how to steal happiness & how the only real joy is singing yourself hoarse & nude girls & how never to eat in an empty restaurant & how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain & how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. I'll teach you how to know what's missing.

Walked the streets until midnight among the people of Paris gorging on joy & I felt stupid & inadequate in my unhappiness & it seemed very clear to me that loneliness is the worst thing in the world & people should ALWAYS be forgiven for all the compromises they make in love.

It's rare to get so attached to another human being in adulthood.

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

Change is when new selves come into the foreground while others recede into forgotten landscapes. Maybe definition of having lived a full life is when every citizen in the hall of selves gets to take you for a spin, the commander the lover the coward the misanthrope the fighter the priest the moral guardian the immoral guardian the lover of life the hater of life the fool the judge the jury the executioner..

You know what your problem is?" she'd say (that's how she always began). "You hate yourself and so you hate others. It's just sour grapes. You're too busy reading and thinking about big things. You don't care about the little things in your own life, and that means you're contemptuous of anyone who does. You've never struggled like they have, because you've never cared like they do. You don't really know what people go through.

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

I can't sit through dinner with somebody I don't like.

Feeling like the last sober man in a crazed nation that ran on booze.

Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo -

Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? True satisfaction can't exist as long as there's one itch left to scratch. And I don't care who you are, there's always an itch.

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.

Love is hard work.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

I sat down on a couch and closed my eyes and pictured myself. I couldn't see anything clearly. Wonderful! That's how it should be!
I am a blurry image constantly trying to come into focus, and just when, for an instant, I have myself in perfectly clarity, I appear as a figure in my own background, fuzzy as hair on a peach

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

The thing that makes a man go crazy isn't loneliness or suffering after all--it's being kept in a state of perpetual dread.

It made no sense to me that people would hate the very thing they aspired to become.

I try to assure myself that "everyone's in debt nowadays" but the fact of it being an epidemic doesn't help one iota, any more than the knowledge of being swept up in a fatal plague would aid in any practical way the infected individual.

Don't be afraid to have nothing.

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

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

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'm just a battler, which means it'll be us against the world, and the world will probably
win hands down every time, but we'll never give up fighting, no matter what, how does that sound?

We were lazy people on an adventure, flirting with life but too shy to go all the way.

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.

It would annoy me to be killed by someone who doesn't especially hate me as an individual, or who I didn't personally betray.

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

We just didn't get it. We were weakened and exhilarated at the same time. A paranoiac's nightmare! A narcissist's dream! We didn't know how to feel: flattered or raped. Maybe both. We were puzzling at breakneck speed.

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

About pain and suffering--he thought that you can bear it all. It's only the fear of pain and suffering that is unbearable.

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.

Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal.

Amen' is like the Send button on an email.

There's only one common element that united every writer I've admired ... they're all incredibly well-read.

Sex: the match that sets off human firework.

The Buddhists are right. Guilty men are not sentenced to death, they are sentenced to life.

The world's not falling apart imperceptibly anymore, these days it makes a loud shredding noise!

I told her they were called stepping-stones because man likes to think that all of nature was set up especially for his feet.

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.

I resisted a strong impulse to pluck out my eye and show it to them.

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.

Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

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.

Come on, just say, "I do." It comes from the verb "to do." That's all you need for now. Then we'll move you on to "I did.

How could I tell him that I now wanted what he had once wanted
to travel on trains and fall in love with girls with dark eyes and extravagant lips? It didn't matter to me if at the end of it I had nothing to show but sore thighs. It wasn't my fault that the life of the wanderer, the wayfarer, had fallen out of favor with the world. So what if it was no longer acceptable to drift with the wind, asking for bread and a roof, sleeping on bales of hay and enjoying dalliances with barefooted farmgirls, then running away before the harvest? This was the life I wanted, blowing around like a leaf with appetites.

I made some probably very cringe-worthy short films that shall hopefully never make the light of day.

Then I started thinking about tears. What was evolution up to when it rendered the human body incapable of concealing sadness? Is it somehow crucial to the survival of the species that we can't hide our melancholy? Why? What's the evolutionary benefit of crying? To elicit sympathy? Does evolution have a Machiavellian streak?