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."
Steve ToltzIf you wanted to pursue some kind of artistic pursuit and you had another career, then you would definitely fall back on it because it would take so long. I never believed I could do two things at once. The jobs I had were minimum wage jobs that you wouldn't want to pursue for too long, or that couldn't really take over your life.
Steve ToltzYou experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.
Steve ToltzI've never had a mentor personally of any kind. It feels like, generally, in the writing world or the art world, it's more of a thing in America, because you have writing programs, which we don't have. You have these amazing writers who are teachers. I never did a writing program so I never met a writer until I was published. I guess I can't really explain my compulsion for writing these kind of mentor characters.
Steve ToltzThere 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.
Steve Toltz