STEVE TOLTZ

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

When people come up to me and say, 'I read your book,' I'm thinking, 'How dare you! Who gave you a copy?'

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

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.

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

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

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.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I haven't been part of the criminal world.

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

I believe everything is autobiographical. If it's not strictly about you, it's your peers, your obsessions, things that make you angry, or things that you've been watching or obsessing about. Preoccupying you for reasons you don't necessarily know, but it's about you. It says a lot about you. It's like when someone tells you their dream and you sit there going, "Do you realize how much you're revealing about yourself right now?" It's kind of embarrassing.

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.

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.

I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.