Steve Toltz

“There is something so arbitrary about prizes.”

“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.”

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

“Amen' is like the Send button on an email.”

“I haven't been part of the criminal world.”

“With medical science improving at roughly the same rate as our environmental situation worsens, the most likely scenario is that the world will become uninhabitable at the precise moment the human race becomes immortal.”

“When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness - it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.”

“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.”

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

“...I wondered if it was blasphemous to tell God that rainbows are kitsch.”

“I can't sit through dinner with somebody I don't like.”

“Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.”

“The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.”

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

“The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.”

“… 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.”

“I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.”

“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.”

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

“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!”