26 Quotes by Christos Tsiolkas

I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.

The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.

Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.

The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.

Homesickness hits hardest in the middle of a crowd in a large, alien city.

It’s alright,” they say, “Of course, there’s beauty there,” but they hold back; you know they have seen or heard of the ugliness and the insularity there. They have experienced the farawayness of it. I have learned to keep silent, not to berate them for their disregard of the Brits’ role in the colonial tragedy of my country.

I want two scars, one on each of my shoulder blades.”He shrugged in confusion. “What do you mean?”“Two scars,” I repeated, “for where my wings used to be, where my wings were torn away from me.

He imagined forgiveness was like flying, that it made you soar. He imagined that it looked like an eagle, a silver bolt in the sky, that it was pure light.

It is gaol that finally reveals to me the beauty of Shakespeare, the spirit in his words, the jaw-dropping audacity of his language.