Quotes from Christos Tsiolkas

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

In reading he found solitude. In reading he could dispel the blare of the world.

In the three minutes it takes the song to play I'm caught in a magic world of harmony and joy, a truly ecstatic joy, where the aching longing to be somewhere else, out of this city, out of this country, out of this body and out of this life, is kept at bay.

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.

Son, always answer back when you receive an insult. Do it straight away. Even if there's a chance there was nothing behind it, take back control, answer them back. An insult is an attack. You must counter.

I like being a faggot, mate, I like it a lot and I think being free in our middle age is what we deserve for straights making our childhood and our teenage years so cuntish.

She did not want the pleasurable and comfortable mediocrity in which she now wallowed to be the sum of her life.

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.

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.

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

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.

What's domesticity? Breakfast in bed? The cuckold going to shoot his wife? Does one inevitably lead to the other? I'm asking because there are no rules anymore and I don't want to end up fucked up. I don't want to destroy anyone through my love. But I don't want to end up chasing intimacy from strangers either.

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?

Once you lose someone's respect it is the hardest thing to win back

Queria passar mais uns minutos no mundo que não fosse dominado pela hierarquia e o snobismo e a vingança.

He was going to take in, possess the whole of the world. Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi? Fuck off. He wanted more.

Everything is fair in love and art.

Transcendence is realising that people do not deserve pity or love or compassion. People deserve contempt.

But just because no-one sang the story, no-one wrote the book, no-one filmed it, that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Discomfort is sometimes what is most precious to me about great art.

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.

She moved in her world in slow motion. The little pills she took kept her safe, her eyes were empty of colour, of light. Every couple of years Joe's father would take his wife to Greece, make a trek to a valley where the Virgin was said to appear. They would drink the holy water, cross themselves, and still the woman would search through her bag to get to the little pills that kept her sane. Sanity is a chemical reaction.

As a young man he had not dared risk God's wrath by questioning His purpose. Now he did not give a damn. Fuck it. There was no Paradise and there was no Hell and if there was a God, He was worse than inscrutable. What did exist was the cold, cruel truth of a young man, dead—from cancer or a car accident or suicide or God knows what—at the obscene age of thirty-two.

Oggi è il compleanno di mamma". "L'hai già chiamata?": "Non ancora"... "Chiamala e basta. Ti farà sentire una merda. Ma è quello che fanno sempre le madri". Non era per niente quello che facevano sempre le madri. Lei non sarebbe diventata quel tipo di madre.