Christos Tsiolkas Quotes

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

I wonder if it is the same for women, whether women always feel this pain when they are fucked? Or is it only in sodomy that pain and pleasure are so linked, so inextricable?

I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.

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.

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.

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.

It is possible the world is divided into three genders - there are men, there are women and then there are women who choose to have nothing to do with children. How about men without children, he answered quickly, aren't they also different from fathers? She shook her head firmly, daring him to contradict her: no, all men are the same.