Steve Toltz Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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?

  Steve Toltz

  Memories, Language, Easy

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.3, Spiegel & Grau

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• Friendships are an unforseeable burden.

  Steve Toltz

  Burden

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.

  Steve Toltz

  Real, Men, Giving

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.372, Spiegel & Grau

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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!

  Steve Toltz

  Memories, Past, Thinking

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”

  6 Copy quote

• We're always sick and we just don't know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.

  Steve Toltz

  Mean, Sick, Deterioration

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.155, Spiegel & Grau

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• 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.

  Steve Toltz

  Men, Giving, Honor

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.3, Spiegel & Grau

  4 Copy quote

• He pointed the gun at me. Then he looked up at my hand & tilted his head slightly. - Journey, he said. I had forgotten I was still holding the book. - Céline, I said back in a whisper. - I love that book. - I'm only halfway through. - Have you got to the point where -- - Hey, kill me, but don't tell me the end!

  Steve Toltz

  Book, Gun, Journey

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Steve Toltz

  Writing, Truthful

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

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• 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

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• … she gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness: uninvited and tireless.

  Steve Toltz

  Memories, Jehovah, Looks

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”

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• 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.

  Steve Toltz

  Children, Vegas, Looks

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A fraction of the whole”

  6 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Steve Toltz

  Animal, Thinking, Water

  Steve Toltz (2008). “A Fraction of the Whole”, p.369, Spiegel & Grau

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

  Steve Toltz

  Men, Two, Way

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• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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