Steve Toltz Quotes

I always suspend logic for emotion. If it feels real, or it feels like what I'm going for, we should abandon reality a little bit and go for that. I'm not a documentarian. We're not trying to shoot things for naturalism.

A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

All that I did was to avail myself of the great privileges of the fiction writer, spring over every scientific difficulty with fancy’s seven-leagued boots, and create on paper what other men were planning out in steel and other metals.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

You can make up your own story when you look at a photo.

Art is a habit-forming drug. Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. People always speak of it with this great, religious reverence, but why should it be so revered?

I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

I'd like to make something about someone who hasn't existed so that I don't have to tread so carefully and can feel a little bit more creative freedom.

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.

Everything is fiction. You only have your own life to work with in the way that a biographer only has the letters and journals to work with.

When you're creating a character out of nothing, you have to make all the guesses as to how they walk, how they talk, how they think. It was all there on the table for us to pick and choose for Murrow.

One man's observation is another man's closed book or flight of fancy.