Latest Steve Toltz Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• My writing goal is just this desperation to get as much done as possible. It's never a comfortable, relaxed thing. Especially because I know so much of the story that I want to tell and I feel so far away from the end. Actually feels a hundred years away, and every hour I'm not working is another hour away from finishing.

  Steve Toltz

  Writing, Goal, Done

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Steve Toltz

  Artist, Difficulty, Uncomfortable

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It's the idea of baggage. When you hear about people in their 40s boast about not having baggage. I think having no baggage is your baggage. That means that you haven't thrown yourself into the mess of life.

  Steve Toltz

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The universe doesn't really care if you bounce back. It doesn't feel that weird to write about paralysis or being in hospital or losing a child or, you know, splitting up with your wife, because that's just life.

  Steve Toltz

  Children, Writing, Wife

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I feel that there are two kinds of writers. I feel that there are writers who are storytellers and then there are those just working out their obsessions. I think I'm a combination. I think, at least for these books, I'm going with fear. I've always been interested in fear. Fear is something I've dealt with in life, and I think it's the main motivating factor of everything, almost. From sex to politics.

  Steve Toltz

  Book, Thinking, Work Out

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Fear of death is understandable, being that we are all going to die, but fear of life and suffering is more of an irrational fear because it's something that can be avoided. The torturous part is that suffering can be avoided if you have good luck. That's somewhat out of our hands, but is it? I don't know. "Is bad luck self-harm by another name?"

  Steve Toltz

  Good Luck, Suffering, Bad Luck

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• On the one hand I'm writing about somebody about whom I say in the book, "The only thing worse than being a statistic is being a statistical anomaly." So I'm writing about a particularly unlucky person. So that's a special type of hell, to be particularly unlucky.

  Steve Toltz

  Book, Writing, Special

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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.

  Steve Toltz

  Artist, Focus, Natural

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you wanted to pursue some kind of artistic pursuit and you had another career, then you would definitely fall back on it because it would take so long. I never believed I could do two things at once. The jobs I had were minimum wage jobs that you wouldn't want to pursue for too long, or that couldn't really take over your life.

  Steve Toltz

  Fall, Long, Over You

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

  Steve Toltz

  Book, Writing, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There are authors like David Foster Wallace or Raymond Chandler - with voice-based authors I might end up a completist, because what I love about them isn't just the particular construction of one novel or another but their flavor. There is an Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, as well. One book is not necessarily greater than another book, but they just have this incredible, unique voice, so it doesn't really matter which one you read.

  Steve Toltz

  Book, Unique, Incredibles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I've never had a mentor personally of any kind. It feels like, generally, in the writing world or the art world, it's more of a thing in America, because you have writing programs, which we don't have. You have these amazing writers who are teachers. I never did a writing program so I never met a writer until I was published. I guess I can't really explain my compulsion for writing these kind of mentor characters.

  Steve Toltz

  Teacher, Art, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.

  Steve Toltz

  Real, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Generally as a rule I am not. Unless I am super in love with a particular author, because I just want to read masterpieces. I just want to read one amazing book after another. As a completist you are generally reading the bad ones.

  Steve Toltz

  Book, Reading, Masterpiece

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I believe everything is autobiographical. If it's not strictly about you, it's your peers, your obsessions, things that make you angry, or things that you've been watching or obsessing about. Preoccupying you for reasons you don't necessarily know, but it's about you. It says a lot about you. It's like when someone tells you their dream and you sit there going, "Do you realize how much you're revealing about yourself right now?" It's kind of embarrassing.

  Steve Toltz

  Dream, Believe, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I have that sort of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David/George Costanza thing where people are like, "How did you feel writing such an unlikable character?" And I'm like, "It's me! I based him on myself!" There are certain moments where they do feel like unwittingly personal attacks.

  Steve Toltz

  Writing, Character, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I was in the hospital and I was paralyzed and I went through all of these things. I've had all of these crazy experiences and jobs in my life, but I never really write about them because I've already told them as stories to friends. For me, the process of writing is the process of invention. But the hospital story felt told already. There was nothing to discover in the telling of it. The discovery had to be in the form. It wasn't really the unfamiliarity of the form, it was more about a way incorporate invention and how to realize it imaginatively.

  Steve Toltz

  Crazy, Writing, Realizing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Steve Toltz

  Writing, Truthful

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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

  Steve Toltz

  Writing, Trying, Amazed

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I try to outline. I'm a lazy outliner. I will put the points down of each chapter or series of chapters, but it always changes. For me it's a place of evolution. I don't really know who the characters are. I don't really know what the story is. I outline and that really just gets me moving. It's like I'm drawing up fake maps, but they turn out to be correct.

  Steve Toltz

  Moving, Character, Fake

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We have this atomic idea of process where we want to believe that the creator of the book or the show had this whole brainy idea at the outset. As though there is something less about it if it comes out of the process of discovery.

  Steve Toltz

  Believe, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com