Steve Toltz Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

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

  Steve Toltz

  Writing, Income, Firsts

  "Word travel with Steve Toltz". Interview with Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. October 8, 2008.

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

  Steve Toltz

  Writing, Truthful

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

• 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 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 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'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

• 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

• I dont 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.

  Steve Toltz

  Moving, Writing, Two

• 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

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