Best 103 quotes of Tim Winton on MyQuotes

Ah, but you, Darkness, you know all this. I tell you night after night. Nothing will shock you. Maybe I go on at you in the hope that there's something beyond you. Some nights I sit here and talk and sob and stare out into the blackness thinking that if I look hard enough I'll see the light behind. But I stay out until the break of day, waiting, hoping, and there's only sunrise again.

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time and space without you.

A problem not so well understood is the growing presence of plastics in the marine food chain. If we don't make big changes fast, the fish we do save may no longer be safe to eat.

Australia was once a leader in taking global warming seriously. The former PM [Kevin Rudd] called it 'greatest moral challenge of our time'. But in the past couple of years the national consensus has been eroded and Australians are being encouraged by the polluters and their mates in Parliament to forget it was ever mentioned. It's heartbreaking.

Being afreaid proves you're alive and awake.

Different tenses and perspectives offer you different things. It helps to distinguish the world that they are in.

Doing nothing is making certain you lose. Which is just gutless.

Every great moment of social change was once a confirmed impossibility. People's determination in the face of overwhelming odds has, time and again, triumphed over what seems impossible. This is what you tell yourself.

For a while Australians were desperately trying to be cosmopolitan. I think it is a pointless exercise. Australian novels are those rooted in Australia, with Australian landscapes and colours. My work has always had bits of Western Australia in it. It is always here. The world comes to us.

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.

Humour is God's special gift to humanity. Handy, because it turns out to be necessary.

Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.

Hunting and gathering are in my blood. But I've lived long enough to witness a diminution in the seas, and to notice a fragility where once I saw - or assumed - an endless bounty.

I came home at dusk with my ears ringing from the quiet.

I can't make something 'useful' to me in a writing sense for a very long time. I don't have any journalistic instinct. And I do keep a journal, but it's neither very revealing nor fruitful for work. Stuff just bubbles up from the swamp later.

I don't believe there's anything cosmic or divine or morally superior about whales and dolphins or sharks or trees, but I do think that everything that lives is holy and somehow integrated; and on cloudy days I suspect that these extraordinary phenomena, and the hundreds of tiny, modest versions no one hears about, are an ocean, an earth, a Creator, something shaking us by the collar, demanding our attention, our fear, our vigilance, our respect, our help.

I don't consciously watch and file lived moments for my work. I have a couple of writer friends who do that and it creeps me out, to be honest. I know people think I must do that too, but I don't. But I do have a long memory.

I don't think it's people's utterances that limit the writing. It's the activity itself. It's actually pretty hard to convey to someone who's not a surfer. The sensation is the thing. And it's tough to describe without resorting to clichés or mystical nonsense.

I eat green ants often enough. They are wonderful. The trick is to squash them before you eat them, otherwise they bite your tongue and it ruins the experience.

If we love the sea as much as we claim to we'll do everything we possibly can to keep it healthy. Otherwise we might as well take up golf.

I grew up in a whaling town. We didn't stop whaling in Australia until 1978. And I've always lived in fishing communities. You could say I'm from the Redneck Wing of marine conservation. Everything I know about the sea I learnt at the end of a spear or a hook. Seems weird to admit it, but I hunted and killed my way to enlightenment. Eventually you see where you've been. All the traces you leave are gaps and absences. And it's a sick feeling, knowing you might bequeath a full dose of Nothing to those who come after you.

I guess it must be a time-of-life thing, looking back and trying to make some sense of who I am and where I've been. It's a weird thing, having to give an account of yourself, to try to make sense of yourself for yourself. I'm not that old, but I have been writing fiction professionally for a long time now. I started so young and went so hard for so long. And I guess it was about feeling I had the space to look over my shoulder.

I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

In Australia surfing was for the oiks. It was always rebellious. And sadly it was for a long time a bit unreflective and macho and anti-intellectual. Unlike other sports it was essentially a youth cult, like rock and roll. But like rock and roll its people grew up.

I never start with what lots of people think of as a subject or a theme. They're school words, not art words. So, writing essays busts my arse because the art is in addressing the subject. I find it really difficult and monstrously time-consuming. In an essay I need to employ my imagination but it's indentured in a way it's not when I'm free to make everything up.

In fiction 'issues' are accidental, sometimes incidental. The place and the people it creates are paramount.

It is always amusing to me and delightful of course that my books sell so well in America and other parts of the world. I can't imagine what people must think as they read my books in Poland. Or in Hebrew and Greek. People are reading all the stories which are about bits of Western Australia.

It is hard for me to speak of themes. I like the reader to do that. Otherwise it feels like writing a 3rd grade essay on someone else's work.

It's dark already and I'm out here again, talking, telling the story to the quiet night.

It's funny, but you never really think much about breathing. Until it's all you ever think about.

It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

It's impossible to imagine what Australia would be like without surfing.

It's sadness coming on like the old days, the vast seamless hopeless weight of sadness looking for a place to rest.

It's terrifying to think you can remember things you shouldn't possibly be able to. It's like that childhood fear of having your soul slip from your body in your sleep. The darkness, those black sheets of glass sliding over you, upping the pressure, pushing you through the time and space and story.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, compassion, art, love. All of them pointless. But they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

I've been a writer and a parent since adolescence, it feels like, and I'm still making both gigs up as I go along. I did both in different forms of isolation - too young by conventional standards, too far off-grid culturally and geographically. So my experience is probably too specific to be useful. None of us do this stuff the same way. We just try to endure and press on, I guess.

I wanted to be a writer all my life. Since I was 10. And then at a certain point I began to assume I was one, which is rich, I know. I didn't meet a writer until I was nearly an adult, so I had no idea what I'd bet the farm on.

I went to school for 12 years, and uni for four, but I learnt more about human existence in the 30 hours it took my first child to be born than I did in all those years of study.

Life is wild by definition. And organic existence is violent. Though I find this hard to accept. And I know it goes against the cultural grain of therapeutic smoothing so dominant in what we like to call 'cultural discourse'.

Nothing is as daunting as the threats associated with global warming. That's the biggie. Everyone bangs on about rising sea levels but the real challenge of a warming planet is ocean acidification. An acid ocean spells the end of life on earth.

Overfishing is an obvious threat to our capacity to feed ourselves.

Past tense offers authority, distance, and present tense offers emotional immediacy.

People are fools, not monsters

People can make symbolic gestures but doesn't mean their life changes. One philanthropic moment doesn't make a life of renewal; of change.

People do change - individuals, families, nations - and the pace of transformation need not be geological.

Somewhere a bicycle bell rings. Somewhere else there's a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.

Surfers travelled and opened up and changed. It became more mainstream, less of a cult. And it diversified. On any given day in the water now I'll meet three generations of surfers, male and female, everyone sporting a different craft. I started surfing in the 60s and I can tell you it's infinitely more diverse. It might be more crowded but it's also more interesting.