Steve Toltz Quotes & Sayings

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

Tell me, sonny, what do you think makes good army material?" the recruiting officer asked. "Light cotton? — Steve Toltz

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

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. — Steve Toltz

The problem is most of the time when God's supposed to be the hero, he comes across as the villain. I mean, look at what he did to Lot's wife. What kind of divine being turns a man's wife into a pillar of salt? What was her crime? Turning her head? You have to admit this is a God hopelessly locked in time, not free of it; otherwise he might have confounded the ancients by turning her into a flat-screen television or at least a pillar of Velcro. — Steve Toltz

The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. — Steve Toltz

I haven't been part of the criminal world. — Steve Toltz

Morrell turned his head upward as if to appraise the azure, featureless sky and nodded, apparently approving of God's use of negative space. — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

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

It's always something here - if there isn't a riot, then someone's usually trying to escape. The wasted effort helps me see the positives of imprisonment. Unlike those pulling their hair out in good society, here we don't have to feel ashamed of our day-to-day unhappiness. Here we have someone visible to blame - someone wearing shiny boots. That's why, on consideration, freedom leaves me cold. Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a real stinker. — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

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? — Steve Toltz

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

Are you listening, Jasper? Sometimes you'll be walking in the city late at night, and a woman walking in front of you will spin her head around and then cross the street simply because some members of your gender rape women and molest children! — Steve Toltz

We know what country this is: It's the stupid place where twenty-plus million people boast about being ordinary. — Steve Toltz

Apparently they died from overfeeding. Apparently I overfed them. Apparently fish are terrible glutons with absolutely no self-control who just don't know when they've had enough and will stuff themselves to death with those innocuous little beige flakes imaginatively labeled 'fish food. — Steve Toltz

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

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

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

Don't be sad for me unless you're prepared to be sad your whole lives. Otherwise forget it. What good's a couple of hard weeks of tears and regret if a month later you're laughing again? No, forget it. Just forget it. — Steve Toltz

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 — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

Love is hard work. — Steve Toltz

On day after class he asked me to wait behind. — Steve Toltz

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

Don't be afraid to have nothing. — Steve Toltz

I think as you get older, there are things that there's just no light side to, but you know, I guess the more you empathise with people, the more empathy you have, the less you are able to see the lighter side. — Steve Toltz

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

... 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

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

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

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

To my horror principles have wormed their way into [the] fabric of my being. — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race? — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

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

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? — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

Friendships are an unforseeable burden. — Steve Toltz

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.. — Steve Toltz

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

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. — Steve Toltz

I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem. — Steve Toltz

People always say, 'Write what you know', but I've always found that to be terrible advice. It's quite limiting, what you know. — Steve Toltz

People trust too much in themselves. What they take for truth, they let rule their lives, and if I set out to find a way to live so I will be in control of my life, then I actually lose control, because the thing I have decided on, my truth, becomes the ruler and I become it's servant. And how can I be free to evolve if I'm submitting myself to a ruler, any ruler, even if that ruler is me? — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

Remembering the past is like watching a Hollywood movie, in that you never see the characters go to the toilet. — Steve Toltz

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

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

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

Optimism isn't funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. It's exaggeration. — Steve Toltz

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! — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

If there is a God, I doubt he is such a hard-liner. Rather, I imagine him greeting the men and women who take their own lives like a police chief surprised when a wanted criminal turns himself in. "You!" he might say, not angry so much as slightly disappointed that he won't get the credit or the satisfaction for the capture. — Steve Toltz

Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it's more exhausting than lifting pianos. — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

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

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

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. — Steve Toltz

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

[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. — Steve Toltz

It's important to always take sides. Both sides, — Steve Toltz

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

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? — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

We drank for another hour and I mutilated many of my most coherent thoughts by putting them into words. — Steve Toltz

There is something so arbitrary about prizes. — Steve Toltz

Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids. — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

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

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. — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

Don't touch me, you fat ghost! — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz

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

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

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. — Steve Toltz

I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon. — Steve Toltz

Sex: the match that sets off human firework. — Steve Toltz

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! — Steve Toltz

There's nothing I would do again the same, and if given the opportunity, I would decline the opportunity. — Steve Toltz

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 — Steve Toltz

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

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. — Steve Toltz

I know you're supposed to hide your influences, but I suppose I see writing as riffing, really, about whatever you have been reading or thinking about that day or that week. — Steve Toltz

People are not mysterious because they never shut up! — Steve Toltz

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

I enjoy being influenced by other writers. — Steve Toltz

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

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. — Steve Toltz

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

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

She always had the outward appearance of indifference, which I suspect is the real secret to longevity. That or a genuine desire to die. — Steve Toltz

I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. — Steve Toltz

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

Amen' is like the Send button on an email. — Steve Toltz

There's freedom in looking crazy. — Steve Toltz

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. — Steve Toltz