Latest Tim Winton Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Humour is God's special gift to humanity. Handy, because it turns out to be necessary.

  Tim Winton

  Humanity, Special, Humour

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.

  Tim Winton

  Pay, Horror, Existential

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• Whatever you believe, you need faith to get through the day.

  Tim Winton

  Believe, Needs

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• The notion that love is abroad in the world has shaped my life.

  Tim Winton

  Love Is, World, Notion

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I grew up in a family that believed love was at work in the world. I guess that's a religious idea, though of course it needn't be.

  Tim Winton

  Religious, Ideas, World

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• The blank page doesn't bother me. It's the voice in my head (not always my own) that gives me the yips. It's worse when I'm not making stuff up.

  Tim Winton

  Voice, Giving, Pages

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.

  Tim Winton

  Children, School, Years

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• What I'm saying so badly is we're bred now to believe we're in control and should be in control.

  Tim Winton

  Believe, Should

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• Life is wild by definition. And organic existence is violent. Though I find this hard to accept. And I know it goes against the cultural grain of therapeutic smoothing so dominant in what we like to call 'cultural discourse'.

  Tim Winton

  Definitions, Life Is, Violent

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I wanted to be a writer all my life. Since I was 10. And then at a certain point I began to assume I was one, which is rich, I know. I didn't meet a writer until I was nearly an adult, so I had no idea what I'd bet the farm on.

  Tim Winton

  Ideas, Adults, Assuming

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I've been a writer and a parent since adolescence, it feels like, and I'm still making both gigs up as I go along. I did both in different forms of isolation - too young by conventional standards, too far off-grid culturally and geographically. So my experience is probably too specific to be useful. None of us do this stuff the same way. We just try to endure and press on, I guess.

  Tim Winton

  Parent, Trying, Different

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I never start with what lots of people think of as a subject or a theme. They're school words, not art words. So, writing essays busts my arse because the art is in addressing the subject. I find it really difficult and monstrously time-consuming. In an essay I need to employ my imagination but it's indentured in a way it's not when I'm free to make everything up.

  Tim Winton

  Art, Writing, School

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I can't make something 'useful' to me in a writing sense for a very long time. I don't have any journalistic instinct. And I do keep a journal, but it's neither very revealing nor fruitful for work. Stuff just bubbles up from the swamp later.

  Tim Winton

  Writing, Long, Swamps

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.

  Tim Winton

  Issues, People, Fiction

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I don't consciously watch and file lived moments for my work. I have a couple of writer friends who do that and it creeps me out, to be honest. I know people think I must do that too, but I don't. But I do have a long memory.

  Tim Winton

  Couple, Memories, Thinking

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• I guess it must be a time-of-life thing, looking back and trying to make some sense of who I am and where I've been. It's a weird thing, having to give an account of yourself, to try to make sense of yourself for yourself. I'm not that old, but I have been writing fiction professionally for a long time now. I started so young and went so hard for so long. And I guess it was about feeling I had the space to look over my shoulder.

  Tim Winton

  Writing, Who I Am, Space

  Source: www.readings.com.au

• We are all part of that global traffic and I think that the effort to make yourself understood and to be not a problem for anyone or to hide your own particuarly is a mistake. I think people will and do value individuality.

  Tim Winton

  Mistake, Thinking, People

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• It is always amusing to me and delightful of course that my books sell so well in America and other parts of the world. I can't imagine what people must think as they read my books in Poland. Or in Hebrew and Greek. People are reading all the stories which are about bits of Western Australia.

  Tim Winton

  Book, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• For a while Australians were desperately trying to be cosmopolitan. I think it is a pointless exercise. Australian novels are those rooted in Australia, with Australian landscapes and colours. My work has always had bits of Western Australia in it. It is always here. The world comes to us.

  Tim Winton

  Exercise, Thinking, Australia

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• People can make symbolic gestures but doesn't mean their life changes. One philanthropic moment doesn't make a life of renewal; of change.

  Tim Winton

  Life Changing, Mean, People

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• We live in specific places. We are marked by a place.

  Tim Winton

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.

  Tim Winton

  Distance, Past, Emotional

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• It is hard for me to speak of themes. I like the reader to do that. Otherwise it feels like writing a 3rd grade essay on someone else's work.

  Tim Winton

  Writing, Speak, Theme

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• Different tenses and perspectives offer you different things. It helps to distinguish the world that they are in.

  Tim Winton

  Perspective, Different, World

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com

• I eat green ants often enough. They are wonderful. The trick is to squash them before you eat them, otherwise they bite your tongue and it ruins the experience.

  Tim Winton

  Squash, Green, Tongue

  Source: www.compulsivereader.com